Announcement category suggestions

faris · Unread post by **faris** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:33 am

When Centos announce an update to a particular package in the Centos Announce mailing list, they add "Security" "Critical" and "Moderate" and things like that to the subject line. This makes it very easy to decide, without even reading the announcement, if and when you might need to take action.

I was wondering if something similar might be useful here for the Announcements topic on the forum (and the asl-announce mailing list which we'll hopefully have at some point).

Something like:

Critical Update
(which would mean you really should update immediately)

Recommended Update
(which would mean you should upgrade at some point but there's no absolute need to do so immediately)

Feature Update
(which would mean new features or functionality have been added - kind of similat to Recommanded but not quite the same because the emphasis is on visible new features rather than bug fixes or minor and invisible enhancements)

New Version
(which would mean a brand new version of something, like ASL 3.0)

Or something along those lines.

So clamav 0.94-2-3 would have had a subject line of something like

"CRITICAL UPDATE: clamav 0.94-2-3"

(Well, it is Critical in my opinion, but others might not agree).

And ASL 2.0.7, when it comes out, might be

"Recommanded Update: ASL 2.0.7"

Assuming other people agree that it would be a Good Thing rather than a pointless waste of time, does anybody have any alternative suggestions or improvements on this basic idea?

** Of course this is all just a discussion for the fun of it/brain-storming thing. As Scott has pointed out, if they spend too much time on announcements they won't have time to produce and update the products.

Faris.

Unread post by **mikeshinn** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 2:14 pm

Good idea. We'll use that format unless anyone else has an issue or recommendation to change it, etc.

Unread post by **scott** » Wed Jan 28, 2009 3:24 pm

The solution Im looking at is to use the fedora yum-security plugin, which has the ability to generate some specific metadata for that. I believe the fields it has are bug, and enhancement. I believe it pulls the data itself from the %changelog in the rpm.

You can see this in action especially well on Fedora 10