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NetBSD Developer Documentation: News story guidelines

Preferred procedure for doing a news story

Preferred procedure for doing a news story

Steps for announcing information (top)

When you want to announce anything official for the project, do it in the following order:

  1. Make sure what you want to announce is both worth it (else put it e.g. into doc/CHANGES), and wanted to be announced. If you're not the one who did the work, ask the person(s) who did.
  2. Add information to the appropriate web page(s), e.g. htdocs/ports/...
  3. Draft a message that you want to send out to and possibly other news channels (see below). Include information on what you announce, maybe describe any special hardware if it can be assumed most people aren't familiar with it. Add a pointer to our web pages (the one containing the actual information, not htdocs/changes or htdocs/index). If there's something to download, add a URL (make sure your upload to ftp.NetBSD.org is complete first). If you're announcing a new port, include a dmesg output.
  4. There's a list of people willing to proofread propaganda material, see below.
  5. Add info to htdocs/changes/index.xml (Short blurb with a pointer to the information from e.g. the Ports section) and run make(1). This will automatically add the necessary entries to htdocs/index.html and at the same time update all of the currently supported translation's index pages. Alternatively, you can run make index from the htdocs root directory.
  6. Commit the above files, and wait until they're on the web server
  7. Send out your announce mail to
  8. Announce things to the following web pages as well:

Listing of volunteer proofreaders (top)

The following people have graciously volunteered to proofread submissions, for those wanting to get postings cleaned up, to the mailing list.

Announcements of new developers (top)

News entries for new developers should be generated once a month around the first for the month before (only if any new developers joined, of course). For this, the script htutils/scripts/announce-devs.pl may be used as below: 

perl htutils/scripts/announce-devs.pl .../localsrc/admin/new-developers/status

This script produces output suitable for inclusion in htdocs/changes/index.xml.

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