by Christian Faulhammer (fauli)

Writing a news item For some time now it is possible to distribute news items to users. The notification is similar to the pending updates in /etc, so users are alerted in a more highlighted manner than by simple elog information that passes by on the screen. To not annoy the user with minor problems, only really important information like a major configuration change in the X component should be announced. As the description in GLEP 42 [1] is quite a lot of text and getting through to the information needed to write a news item is relatively hard, I want to make a summary of the steps to take. No responsibilty though, the GLEP stays the definitive source of wisdom:

1. Choose a correct file name: YYYY-MM-DD-name.lang.txt, where the date is followed by a name (all letters and numbers allowed, plus dash and underscore), the two-letter ISO language code (en for English must be chosen as default) and the file extension txt.

2. Write the news item, which is similar to a RFC-compliant email. Details what is allowed can be found in the appropriate GLEP section . As a note: Exceptions depending on installed packages or activated profiles is possible.

3. Send the news item to the gentoo-dev mailing list and the Gentoo PR team (pr@g.o) 72 hours in advance of commit.

4. Wait for corrections or people who tell you that your news item is not of great importance and should be revoked (can be possible).

5. Crate a detached armored GnuPG signature with gpg --detach-signature --armor YYYY-MM-DD-name.lang.txt

6. Create a directory structure for your item in the Gentoo News repository gentoo-news: YYYY/MM (e.g. 2011/06 for a news item published in June 2011).

7. Add signature and news file to that directory.

8. Commit both

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0042.html