On 11/20/06, robert burrell donkin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
i strongly recommend adding RELEASE_NOTES. these are an important form of guerrilla advertising. yes, tools like maven can generate lots of documentation about the release but this doesn't replace a RELEASE_NOTES explaining the project, inviting people to get involved and inducating where other information can be found.
In XFire we made our release notes our download page. This allowed us to inform the users, welcome them into the project, and provide up to date errata whenever they went to download. In the days of maven, a lot of people don't even download a distribution any more: in the month of October roughly 60% of the XFire users downloaded the binary distribution and 40% downloaded via Maven. If you factor in the amount of people that actually read the release notes, I think we are now in a situation where we have much less than half reading them (maybe less than 10%). Making the release notes the download page makes sure 100% of the people see it. Sticking it in the distribution also has other issues, namely people don't maintain the release notes and they can not be updated with errata after the release. So I think that having a release notes in the distribution is overrated and using the website can be a better approach. - Dan * -- Dan Diephouse Envoi Solutions http://envoisolutions.com | http://netzooid.com/blog
