moving away from changelog.dd?

[Walter Bright]

On 12/25/2012 11:19 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 25, 2012 04:18:10 Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 12/25/2012 3:41 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>>> I think that that's what most of us are agreed upon at this point. What is
>>> currently the WHATSNEW section will continue to be done by hand, but the
>>> LIBBUGSFIXED section will be autogenerated.
>>
>> WHATSNEW is a list of new features, which are (or should be) in bugzilla as
>> enhancement requests.
>
> So, if we put a new module through the review process, we're going to go and
> create an ehancement request for it after the fact just so that it's in
> bugzilla and shows up in the automatically generated changelog?

Yes. Recall that there are a pretty small number of these, so it's fair to 
compromise on this.

> That seems off
> to me. Bugzilla is for reporting bugs or requesting that things be added to
> the language or library, not for reporting everything that we do.
> The SCM log is for that.

That log is pretty useless for anyone who wants a list of bug fixes and new 
features, as it is full of commits that are irrelevant to users.


> Also, some of those sorts of changes should probably get more prominence than
> they're likely to get in the middle of a list of bugzilla issues, or they may
> require further explanation.

Full explanations were never what the changelog was for, that's why it is a list 
of clickable links.

> And it's not like it takes much time or effort to maintain the the WHATSNEW
> section, as it's much smaller than the bug fix section.

Nor does it take much time or effort to add 3 enhancement requests to Bugzilla 
for new modules.


>> Various musings, rationales, future changes, etc., should go in a separate
>> document called releasenotes.
>>
>> I don't think it's viable to have a document half-generated automatically
>> and half-editted by humans.
>
> I really don't see why not. The section with new stuff gets written by hand and
> the bug fix section gets created with a bugzilla query. What's so hard about
> that?

Sure it's possible, but I prefer to keep the complexity down of generating the 
site. Also, releasenotes and changelog serve different purposes, it makes sense 
to have them be separate documents. (A future change is NOT a change to the 
current release.)


> I don't think that we've been having any problems whatsoever dealing
> with the WHATSNEW section.

Yes, we have. Things have frequently been omitted.