Doing away with changelogs

[Nicolas Williams]

On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 10:30:54AM -0400, Alexandra Ellwood wrote:
> It sounds like the problem people use the Changelogs to solve is  
> "what change introduced this new behavior I don't like."
> 
> I suspect this need would be fulfilled by just improving our release  
> notes so that they list all the bugs fixed and the svn commit lines  
> to show what files were impacted by each change.  Associating each  
> change with a bug number would in fact be an improvement over the  
> Changelogs since you'd know what bug needs to be reopened/referenced  
> once you discover which change broken things.

I agree, list bug/RFE IDs and synopsis in the release notes.

> Given the size of our project such a list would have to be  
> autogenerated and provided separately from the overview list in the  
> release announcement email -- at least in major releases.

Also, this requires discipline, namely ensuring that every commit is
associated with a bug/RFE with a useful synopsis, description and
evaluation.

> If one of the people asking for this functionality wanted to  
> contribute a more sophisticated release notes generation process for  
> our release which provides the content they need, I suspect we would  
> be happy to consider it for inclusion in our release process.  Our  
> entire developer community has access to the systems necessary to  
> write these scripts (svn repository, RT bug tracking database).  Even  
> if we don't end up taking such a system you can still provide your  
> own release notes for our releases.

You still need a human to write up a summary that lists salient
features/bugs added/fixed by the release.

Nico
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