Changes (Announcing) SoP

This document describes the process of announcing Changes.

Timing/trigger

This process is constant.

Process

Proposals are sent to the development community for public comment.

  1. Verify that the proposal is complete and correct

    1. You can choose to announce proposals that are missing some required fields (e.g. Releng ticket), on the condition that those are complete before it is sent to FESCo

    2. Ensure the page has the {{Change_Proposal_Banner}} macro at the top

    3. Put the Owner and Email fields are one line instead of multiple. This will make the BZ creation easier later.

  2. Compose an email as follows.

    1. Set the to: field to devel-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org and the reply-to: field to devel@lists.fedoraproject.org

    2. Set the subject to F<NN> proposal: <title> (<System-Wide|Self-Contained> Change proposal). This is to make it clear to external readers that this is a proposal and not a final decision.

    3. In the body of the email, add the URL to the wiki page

    4. Copy the "this is a proposal" content from the wiki page into the body. Again, this is so that it’s unambigiously clear.

    5. Copy the wiki source into the body, removing comments and performing other readability cleanup as you deem necessary.

  3. Send the email

  4. Create a post in the Discourse Change Proposals category.

    1. Set the topic to F<NN> Change Proposal: <title> (<System-Wide|Self-Contained>).

    2. Place a link to the wiki page and a link to the devel-announce post at the top of the post.

    3. Then copy the "this is a proposal" content from the wiki page into the post.

    4. Copy the contents of the wiki page into the post, applying Markdown formatting as appropriate. You can try converting the wiki text to markdown by saving it as change.txt and running pandoc -f mediawiki -w markdown /change.txt -o /change.md, but it will not work perfectly and will still require manual adjustment.

  5. Reply to your original announcement email, again with reply-to set to devel@lists.fedoraproject.org, with the content: The discussion thread to provide feedback for this change proposal can be found here: https://(link_to_discourse_post)

  6. Update the wiki page

    1. Replace the ChangeReadyForWrangler category with ChangeAnnounced

    2. Add a link to the devel-announce thread in the Current status section, with the title "Announced"

    3. Add a link to the Discourse thread in the same section, with the title "Discussion Thread"

  7. Add an entry to the Changes table for the release in Friday’s Fedora Facts

Once you have sent the email, you do not need to further participate in the discussion. However, you should at least monitor the tone in case it gets heated.

You can use the pending_changes.py script to list proposals that are awaiting announcement. This is particularly helpful if you set it up in a cron job or systemd timer.