D 1.076 and 2.061 release

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, January 03, 2013 22:24:34 Walter Bright wrote:
> Please note that the documentation that was there before in the changelog,
> but with no corresponding bugzilla entry, has been cut & pasted into the
> enhancement request bugzilla entry that I created for it.
> 
> Nothing has been lost or removed.

And where are items like

$(LI std.range.hasSlicing has been made stricter in an effort to make it more 
reliable. opSlice for infinite ranges must now return the result of 
std.range.take, and any range with slicing which supports $(D $) must now 
support it with the same semantics as arrays (including supporting subtraction 
for finite ranges).)

That's something that should be listed prominently, not buried in a long list 
of bugzilla entries. If you want to put that sort of thing in a separate 
release notes section, fine. But notes like this do _not_ belong in a list of 
bugzilla entries. They should be prominently displayed to users.

> In fact, this has pointed out quite a few New/Changed Features that had been
> omitted from the human curated list. I think that a complete list is better
> than the buggy, half-assed one we had before.
> 
> I will certainly concur that a lot (most?) of the titles on the bugzilla
> enhancement requests kinda suck, but you or I or anyone else can fix them as
> necessary, and I did fix a few of them.

I'm all for automating the bug fixes, and it makes perfect sense to handle many 
of the enhancement requests in the same way, but we should have a way to 
highlight major changes separately from the list of bugzilla entries (which 
have no indication of prominence or relative importance) as well as an area 
for giving specific notes to developers when needed (like major changes they 
should watch out for or impending changes that they should be aware of). If 
that's a separate release notes section rather than in the changelog itself, 
so be it, but we've now completely lost the section that we were using for 
that sort of thing. Instead, it's now simply a link to a bunch of bugzilla 
entries.

- Jonathan M Davis


P.S. Also, as a future improvement, we _really_ shouldn't be linking to 
bugzilla for our list. I've never seen a release notes document or changelog 
do that in my entire life. It would be _far_ more user friendly to list the 
changes like we did before with the bug number for each entry linking to the 
bug report (and it's what most projects to do from what I've seen). 
Automatically generating the list of bug fixes is great (and a definite step 
forward), but the current presentation leaves a lot to be desired.