[Python-Dev] What's New editing

[R. David Murray]

On Mon, 06 Jul 2015 11:06:41 +1000, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6 July 2015 at 03:52, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:
> > Just so people aren't caught unawares, it is very unlikely that I will have
> > time to be the final editor on "What's New for 3.5" they way I was for 3.3 and
> > 3.4.
> 
> And thank you again for your work on those!
> 
> > I've tried to encourage people to keep What's New up to date, but
> > *someone* should make a final editing pass.  Ideally they'd do at least the
> > research Serhiy did last year on checking that there's a mention for all of the
> > versionadded and versionchanged 3.5's in the docs.  Even better would be to
> > review the NEWS and/or commit history...but *that* is a really big job these
> > days....
> 
> What would your rough estimate of the scope of work be? As you note,
> the amount of effort involved in doing a thorough job of that has
> expanded beyond what can reasonably be expected of volunteer
> contributors, so I'm wondering if it might make sense for the PSF to
> start offering a contract technical writing gig to finalise the What's
> New documentation for each new release.
> 
> After all, the What's New doc is an essential component of
> communicating changes in recommended development practices to Python
> educators, so ensuring we do a good job with that can have a big
> multiplier effect on all the other work that goes into creating each
> new release.

I can tell you that 3.4 took me approximately 67 hours according to my
time log.  That was going through the list prepared by Serhiy, and going
through pretty much all of the NEWS entries but not the commit log.  I'm
a precisionist, so I suspect someone less...ocd...about the details
could do it a bit faster, perhaps at the cost of some small amount of
accuracy :)

On the other hand, my knowledge of the code base and the development
that had been going on probably sped up my analysis and writeup of
the missing entries (and revision of existing entries, in many cases).

On gripping hand, I also did some small amount of documentation
rewriting and clarification along the way.

--David