Re: Centralized Linux announcements/news list?

[cbbrowne@hex.net]

You may want to edit this if you plan to forward responses anywhere...

> Currently when you want to announce some new Linux news, you go to a
> half dozen or dozen sites, and you perform the "submit news" ritual at
> each one of these sites. This is a daunting task for a company new to
> the Linux community. 
> 
> Indeed, even for people comfortable with our way of distributing
> information, we still have the problems that it takes extra time at each
> site, and most people doing announces are bound to miss some or even
> most of the sites they ought to have gotten to. 
> 
> I noticed that lwn and freshmeat combined part of their apps-reporting
> sections recently to cut down on duplicated work. Are there more plans
> of this in the future? I recognize that each site has unique features
> that distinguish it from the other information sites in the Linux
> community, but there are definitely still overlaps in work and function.
> 
> Have the major news sources considered creating a more centralized
> location for each of the types of news? (Eg press releases, non-published
> advocacy materials, security announcements, opensource application
> announcements, commercial application announcements, popular interest
> announcements and discussion (a la slashdot), etc.) I noticed that the
> Linux News Agency (http://www.cdm.com.mx/newswire/LinuxNews.html) looks
> like it's a start, but I'd never heard of it before I started hunting
> today, I have no idea if it's being maintained or if it works, and in
> fact it looks like I need to download a helper application to read their
> news, which is completely unacceptable.

I would suggest that what is needed is *not* a centralized location, but 
rather a somewhat standardized *PROTOCOL* for representing this sort of 
information.

By standardizing protocol, this means that varying sites can "feed" one 
another in an automatic fashion, in much the fashion that LWN, FreshMeat, and 
SlashDot "share" material.

The "rpm2html" software that <http://rufus.w3.org/linux/rpm2html/> provides 
presents a preliminary view on this.  Obviously it's pretty directed at this 
oint towards presenting RPM packages.  The idea should nonetheless be 
extensible to store information about more diverse things such as commercial 
product announcements.

One of the strengths of Linux is the fact that things are largely not highly
centralized; building such a "distributed database" of announcement
information would be a further extension of this.
--
Christopher B. Browne, cbbrowne@hex.net, chris_browne@sdt.com
Web: http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne  SAP Basis Consultant, UNIX Guy
Windows NT - How to make a 100 MIPS Linux workstation perform like an 8 MHz 286