Alexander Reichle-Schmehl is working hard to revitalize the Debian Project News with a group of volunteers – see what you can do to help them!
Hi!
Okay, the first steps are taken. And we could start to create our missed newsletter. So here is a rough documentation on how to do that.
As already explained, we’ll use svn and a alioth project for creating them.
* If you are a DD everything should already be fine; you have an account on alioth and should have write permissions to the svn repository (well, we are working on it, but soon you should have)
* If you are not a DD, but have already an account on alioth, please either request to join the publicity project or tell me your account name, to I can add you.
* If you are not a DD, and have not yet an alioth account, please request one on https://alioth.debian.org/account/register.php and then either request to join the publicity project or tell me your account name.
For convenience of use, you might also want to read “Setting up SSH the first time” at http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/Svn#SettingupSSHthefirsttime
First step: Checking out the repository
You should now be able to run “svn co svn+ssh://svn.alioth.debian.org/svn/publicity/dpn/en/current” (if you haven’t set up use svn+ssh://@svn.alioth.debian.org/svn/publicity/dpn/en/current), which should create you a “current” directory with an “index.wml”. If you don’t like the name “current” you are free to rename it as you wish.
Second step: Edit the news
In “current” directory is a fine named “index.wml”. That file is what will become one day the Debian Project News. As someone might have changed it, you should run an “svn update” before editing it. That will get the latest changes from repository on the alioth-Server. You can now edit the file in your preferred text editor and send your changes back to the repository by doing an “svn commit index.wml”. You’ll be asked to describe your changes in a “commit message” and after you’ve done that, your changes will be send to the repository, available for others.
Third step: Repeat second step until the issue is finished 
For those, having a deeper interested: There’s also a commit mailing list at http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/publicity-commits
And of course you can check out the entire repository, too. If you like, feel free to use that for translations of the DPN, too.
You’ll also note, that there is a script directory in the dpn folder. I added some scripts there, which where used in the past in the creation process. If you are just adding some news you can just ignore them.
* create-rc-stats is a really ugly script creating the Release Critical Bug stats. A a proper rewrite using the soap interface of the bug tracking system would be most welcome
* DPNhtml2mail.pl Can be used to create the test version of the DPN based upon the wml file.
* newpkgs will list the new packages of the last seven days and format them to directly include them in the wml file. Note: Some of them are really boring (for example added debug packages), so we removed them, or quite numerous (dozens of new linux packages), so we shorted them.
So much for now. Missing documentation:
* Process of sending out a finished issue and creating a new empty template
* Small explanation of that “wml” stuff used for Debian’s website
Best regards,
Alexander
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