Derek Atkins schrieb:
On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 16:25 -0500, Chris Shoemaker wrote:
Comments?
This change is fine with me, and sounds good.
Before we go ahead with this, I'd like to hear from Chris Lyttle
and Christian Stimming.. They're the ones who usually use the
ChangeLog to generate the NEWS and release notes. I'd like to
hear if they are willing to accept the new process going forward.
I wouldn't throw away our ChangeLog convention too quickly. It used to
be (and still is) a good compromise between readability and verbosity.
The problem is that we don't have any experience with maintaining that
obnoxious "big picture file", which supposedly would be the NEWS file.
So far that file has been used for the release notes until 1.7.8 but is
unused since them. We do have experience with the Changelog file, and
these are good experiences so far. Developer tend to copy the ChangeLog
entry to the CVS/SVN commit log or vice versa, so this convention
doesn't seem to put too much of an additional work on the developers.
As for compiling the release notes: Definitely the "svn log" is way too
verbose for the normal release note compilation. Currently working
through anything between 100 or 500 lines of ChangeLog during 1.8.x was
doable, but thousands of lines of "svn log" really is way too much.
IMHO our ChangeLog convention or what developers did from that meant
that all the totally-trivial things were already filtered out, and this
would be lost if we don't use ChangeLog at all. The point is that
ChangeLog still is the "note collection for the developers", whereas the
NEWS is the "note collection for the public", i.e. only that stuff that
as the time of writing is already considered fundamentally important.
Many things that might not be considered important at the time of
writing will not be added to the NEWS file, whereas they are added to
the ChangeLog -- where the release note collectors will pick it up at
the time when it's required.
At some level it's OUR job as developers to make OTHERS lives
easier.. While we should certainly use tools to make OUR lives
easier, we need to think of who is using what we create and how
they use it. Making life easier for us at their expense is NOT
okay. So, I'd like to hear from wilddev and cstim first.
I prefer if there still is a place where every developer adds a note for
the majority of the non-trivial commits. Doesn't have to be the
ChangeLog, but IMHO that's the easiest way to do this. The NEWS file
IMHO is "too official"/"too public" for that goal.
Christian
_______________________________________________
gnucash-devel mailing list
gnucash-devel@gnucash.org
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
