[TAG] (forw) The Linux Gazette

[Ben Okopnik]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 11:54:40PM -0700, Raj Shekhar wrote:
> In infinite wisdom Rick Moen said the following On 6/3/09 4:39 PM:

That was Kat - in her infinite wisdom - actually. :)

> > - Enough people copyediting so that the loss of one or more
> >   volunteers a month doesn't lead to a critical
> >   shortage. Additionally, more copyeditors means fewer mistakes make
> >   it through, and less burden on any one editor.  *Many* people
> >   should be reading each article, and no one should be feeling
> >   pressured to read all the articles unless they wish to. We need
> >   more technical editors to vet articles within their realm of
> >   expertise.
>
> > - Someone, or a team of someones, who are in charge of dealing with
> >   scripting issues as they come up. Ideally this person is able to
> >   be on-call at the end of each month for any emergency coding
> >   issues, and it would be better to have a group available, so that
> >   there's no single point of failure.
>
> Are the above two problems sociological problems or technological
> problems?  i.e. is the TAG-team too intimidating that people think
> twice before volunteering or are the tools being used to hammer out LG
> not sharp enough?

> I do not have any suggestions on how to fix the problem if it is a
> sociological problem but if it is a problem with the tools, then we
> should identify the tools which cause the most headache and fix them.
> I have some perl/php scripting skills and I can help with that.

Hi, Raj - 

Well, it's nothing broken per se, but as an ultra-low priority task,
I've been contemplating rewriting the publishing script from Python,
which is what Mike Orr used, to Perl plus some sort of a templating
engine (HTML::Template or Template, maybe.) I'm not a Python guy myself,
and absent an on-call Python team, having to puzzle out Python in
emergencies, under time pressure on each occasion, has definitely been
one of my least favorite LG tasks.

So, in the long term, if you're interested in rewriting the publishing
scripts, that would be a really good thing. It wouldn't even be all that
complex. I'd do it myself, but as you know, I've got a big list of tasks
for LG already.

In the short term, the LG problems are mainly "sociological" - social,
really - and we seem to be slowly getting a handle on those. If you've
got any potential writers or editors in your contact list, please ping
them about participating, and perhaps recruiting others. The more people
we have out hunting for volunteers, the easier it gets.


-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *