[En-Nut-Discussion] Changelog for releases

Ole Reinhardt ole.reinhardt at embedded-it.de
Tue Aug 21 18:46:51 CEST 2012


Hi Harald,

> Actually I expected something, which gives a brief overview about new
> features and important changes. So I created

[...]


> This is almost the same, isn't it?
> 
> Let's go into details: The typical user will move from 4.10 to 5.0, but 4.10 is not mentioned in NEWS. Instead the user will be informed, that

Yes I know that my aggregation is not the universal truth.

I tried to aggregate the interesting informations from the SVN log,
devided it into three sub-sections and filtered out lots of
uninteresting stuff like "fixed a typo, renamed a file, added this
unimportant line of code" and so on...

You are right, I only looked at the trunk. So only development versions
are included here. Sorry for that.

Again, I know it's not the best way of doing it, but I wanted to create
at least an overview that most people can understand.

The real main problem is the fact that the informations in the SVN
changelog mostly are held too short and does not give you an information
about the importance of a change.

> - r4197: AT91 TWI: Fix RTC hangup on AT91SAM9XE CPU.
> 
> But it had been fixed in 4.10 at r4234. Isn't that more confusing than
> helpful? At least I cannot see the difference to svn log.

Yes, you are right. Anyway I don't know which would be the best way of
adding such information.

I really would appreciate to have an overview about what was changed at
what time, what is in the release. I tried my best for the past and hope
we could improve it for the future.

It is the responsebility of every developer with write access to the SVN
to add an informative log describing the problem and the solution to
each svn checking and also to give a hint about the importance of the
change.

Then we could keep this list much shorter and more informative to the
end-user.

> May be I haven't fully understood, what you expect from NEWS.

My first intention was something like the kernel changelog:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/ChangeLog-3.5.2

Which is much more informative than our SVN changelog but still totally unreadable.

Ideally something like 

http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=blob_plain;f=NEWS;hb=HEAD

How can we achieve that every developer will cultivate it like this?

How to make the right trade-off of the importance (So we should not list everything but what is important enough?)

Any comments are wellcome :)

Bye,

Ole



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