Re: Centralized Linux announcements/news list?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@seul.org>]

In message <Pine.LNX.4.02.9807291041420.31593-100000@schlong.llamaland.org>, scoop@freshmeat.net writes:
>Then you're absolutely right there's overlapping efforts in the community
>regarding news resources. But then I think it's completely unnecessary for
>a company to add a word about an upcoming release or the planned efforts
>of a Linux port.

Woah.
While that may be true for large companies like Oracle and Corel, it's
much less true for the really small companies. In particular, educational
software companies tend to be small and not very well known.

>The Linux community is a very quick one. The important
>word spreads like a bushfire. As long as it's an important news bit and
>the maintainers of each site are as quick as the community itself, the
>article will appea in/on each and every important news resource in a
>matter of hours.

Yes, but some of these bits of news might not seem as important to
everybody -- for instance, "Company foo just released a typing tutor
program for Linux" really isn't going to make it into most news places
(and maybe it shouldn't, at that). What I'm saying there is that there
should be a well-known site somewhere that tells companies who want to let
the world know about their program exactly how to go about doing that.

But on a different note (about general news/announcements rather than
educational-software-specific announcements), Christopher Browne suggested
that instead of trying to centralize the location of news, we should
develop a standardized API (or protocol) for representing this sort of
information. Then news items could automatically be shared between
participating sites, in a format that they all liked.

This would behave similarly to network news, except presumably there would
be fewer nodes. LDAP is a possibility for this, but I don't know enough
about it to know if it's suitable (it's been suggested that it's still
too centralized for our purposes). Christopher suggested a format similar
to that of rpm2html (http://rufus.w3.org/linux/rpm2html/).

As Chris said,
|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.

Please let me know what you think. Dave (from threepoint) suggested setting
up a list so we could discuss this more thoroughly, and actually make
something happen.

>Just my $0.02

Thanks!
--Roger