ompiling status reports - best practices
Quarterly status reports git repository:
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-quarterly
E-mail address for report submissions:
quarterly-submissions@FreeBSD.org
0) Timeline
- The months of January, April, July and October are dedicated to
putting together the reports submitted during the precedent month.
This can include waiting for late submissions.
- portmgr@ entries default to the extended headline, because of the
overlap between quarterly reports and quarterly ports branches.
- All entries can have the deadline extended by emailing
quarterly-submissions@ up until the extended deadline.
- Quarterly status report publication is done during the same months
as soon as the report is ready.
- First Quarter:
- First call for reports: March 1st
- 2 weeks left reminder: March 15th
- Last reminder: March 24th
- Standard deadline: March 31st
- Extended deadline: April 8th
- Second Quarter:
- First call for reports: June 1st
- 2 weeks left reminder: June 15th
- Last reminder: June 24th
- Standard deadline: June 30th
- Extended deadline: July 8th
- Third Quarter:
- First call for reports: September 1st
- 2 weeks left reminder: September 15th
- Last reminder: September 24th
- Standard deadline: September 30th
- Extended deadline: October 8th
- Fourth Quarter:
- First call for reports: December 1st
- 2 weeks left reminder: December 15th
- Last reminder: December 24th
- Standard deadline: December 31st
- Extended deadline: January 8th
1) Call for reports
- Send calls to the freebsd-quarterly-calls@ mailing list, to all
submitters of last quarterly status reports (they may have updates
or further improvements), and, depending on the season:
- Various conference organizers:
- AsiaBSDCon (secretary@asiabsdcon.org) March (First Quarter);
- BSDCan (info@bsdcan.org) May (Second Quarter);
- EuroBSDcon September - October (Third-Fourth Quarter).
EuroBSDcon as an organization is not interested in writing
reports for FreeBSD (at least it was not in October 2019:
its reason is that the conference is not FreeBSD specific),
so reports about this event should be asked of members of the
FreeBSD community that attended it;
- Google Summer of Code students and their mentors: soc-students@
and soc-mentors@ (Second and Third Quarter).
- The easiest way to send calls for quarterly status reports is to use
the sendcalls perl script in the tools directory of the git
repository. It can also be used through a cron job, for example:
0 0 1,15,24 3,6,9,12 * cd ~/freebsd-quarterly/tools && ./sendcalls -s 'Daniel Ebdrup Jensen'
If you are indeed using a cron job, please run it on freefall and
sign it with your name so that it is possible to infer who has
configured the cronjob, in case something goes wrong.
The script automatically sends calls to freebsd-quarterly-calls@, last
quarter submitters and other recipients depending on the season.
- It may also be worth making a call for reports on the forums as was
done here:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/call-for-freebsd-2014q4-october-december-status-reports.49812/
- The Markdown template is at:
https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-sample.md
- Reporting howto is at: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/howto.html.
It contains a great deal of useful hints for the submitters on how
to write good reports. It also helps to forward all the completed
reports to developers for reference, and point to the latest report
in the CFR.
2) Building the report:
- Review and merge pull requests as well as those submitted via email,
as they come in.
- For each newly merged report, add its filename to the local Makefile:
put it in the variable corresponding to the section where you want
the report to appear. Sort the variables content as you want to sort
the reports in the corresponding section.
- While the reports are being updated, other doc-committers (wblock,
pluknet, and bjk, for example) may review the individual entries and
propose fixes.
- Write an introduction in a file named intro.md in the quarterly
directory.
It should be usually the last step in the process; a good introduction
can be only written once all the reports have been collected.
- theraven may be poked for composing a nice introduction for the
reports.
wblock suggests that we ask different people to write introductions to
add variety. Different people will bring different viewpoints and
help keep it fresh.
- Run "make" or "make all-xml" in the quarter directory. This step
needs perl as it invokes the md2docbook perl script. Warning:
md2docbook lacks some features and likely has some bugs. Do not waste
your time working on it and use manual editing instead: once the
conversion of the FreeBSD website to Hugo/AsciiDoctor is finished the
md2docbook script will become obsolete.
- Copy the generated DocBook draft to
en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-XXXX-YY-XXXX-ZZ.xml,
add it to the list in en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/Makefile,
run "make", and review the generated HTML file,
en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-XXXX-YY-XXXX-ZZ.html.
This step requires that you have installed textproc/docproj on your
system.
- Adjust the Markdown source and regenerate until you are happy with
the result.
- Some special characters still break with that - noticed when sos@
submits a report.
3) Committing it:
- Files to edit and commit:
The quarterly report itself:
doc/website/content/en/status/report-yyyy-mm-yyyy-mm.xml
Update the next due date on the status report page and
add a link to the new report below that:
doc/website/content/en/status/_index.adoc
The news entry for the main website page:
doc/website/data/en/news/news.toml
Sample for the news entry (may need to add month):
[[news]]
date = "2021-01-16"
title = "October-December 2020 Status Report"
description = "The <a href=\"https://www.FreeBSD.org/status/report-2020-10-2020-12.html\">October to December 2020 Status Report</a> is now available with 42 entries."
- After the html version of the report has been built and is online,
run in the quarter directory "make all-txt" and prettify its output.
This step requires that you have installed www/lynx and lang/perl5.30
(or newer) on your system.
lynx defaults to a width of 80 and will forcibly wrap URLs to fit
within that size. The prettification process includes undoing that
wrapping of URLS, which is made easier by some questions that are
asked of you during "make all-txt". In some cases lynx will refuse to
output certain Unicode characters (such as the U+0142 LATIN SMALL
LETTER L WITH STROKE found in trasz's surname), instead using an ASCII
transliteration; these should be returned to the UTF-8 form.
- Send out
To: announce@
Subject: FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report - <First> Quarter <year>
This one must be approved, so find someone (mail postmaster) who can
do that before starting.
Send a separate mail:
To: hackers
CC: current, stable
BCC: developers
4) Repeat.
