> I've been pushing this agenda for a few releases now, but some people have > been, er, boycotting it. I think, too, that release notes *must* be > written incrementally at the same time that the feature change is made. > This is the only way we can get accurate and complete release notes, and > the descriptions could even include some context, some motivations, etc. > We have release cycles of 10 months, and there is no way we can make > sensible release notes by gathering individual commit messages over that > period of time. Heck, ECPG has a full Informix compatibility mode and > there is no mention of that anywhere, because there was no commit "Add > Informix mode." > > I suggest we just do it like the documentation: If you don't document it, > it doesn't exist. If you don't write a line for the release notes, it > doesn't exist either.
I tend to agree it. For every release I and my colleague have been working on creating detailed release notes (of course in Japanese), otherwise we cannot tell people what are changed, added or fixed since there is little info in the official release note. This is painful since we have to dig into the mail archives and cvs commit messages to look for what each item of the official release note actually means. These work take at least 2 to 3 weeks with several people involved. The hardest part is what are fixed. The only useful information seems to be the cvs commit messages, however typical messages are something like "see recent discussions in the mail archive for more details". This is not very helpful at least for me. Once I proposed that we add a sequence number to each mail and the commit messages point to the number. This way we could easily trace what are the bug report and what are the actual intention for the fix. For some reason noboy was interested in. Maybe this is due to "coulture gap"... (In Japan giving a sequence number to each mail in mailing lists is quite common). -- Tatsuo Ishii ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
