[En-Nut-Discussion] Changelog for releases

[Harald Kipp]

Hi Ole,

On 19.06.2012 12:20, Ole Reinhardt wrote:
 
> In fact currently we don't have a real changelog at all. Sure, there is
> the SVN where we could extract informations about every single checkin,

The old ChangeLog contained the same information, that should now go into the SVN commit.


> but there is no real changelog or release notes that explain what has
> changes since the last release in a more clear and abstract way.

I know what you mean, but please do not use the old ChangeLog for this, because it might become confusing. In no way I want to introduce that old behavior, where we used "I modified a few lines" for the commit and a real description in ChangeLog. The real description needs to go into the commit message. If these commit messages are not precise enough, we should improve them instead of opening another secondary log.


> What I would prefer is a kind of Changelog / Release notes in the
> following manner:
> 
> 
> - Fixed bug (#1234556):
>   Short description of the bug fixed
> 
> - New device driver xyz added
> 
> - Cortex M3 port added
> 
> etc...

Release notes sounds much better to me. I agree, that we need some kind of overview. But for historical reasons ChangeLog wouldn't be the right name. We may, for example, use NEWS or README, which already exist in the repository.

But your "kind of" is to vague to me. If we do not define this more exactly, we may end up with the same dissatisfying descriptions that we have now in the repository.

In the first place, I'd divide the release notes into sections: Added, changed, fixed and removed.

We need to specify, down to which level these entries should be listed outside of subversion. For example, I'd only list those changes, which significantly improve code size or performance, and changes which break existing applications.

 
> And second I would like to ask Harald to perhaps add a release notes
> file (== extract from the Changelog since the last release) to the
> website.

No problem.

In addition: AFAIK, SourceForge (and several other tools/services) will automatically display README, if included in the files folder.

Regards,

Harald