Release notes (was: GSoC application deadline passed)

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 08:46:23AM +0100, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> El Wednesday, 19 de March de 2008 16:05:27 olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net
> escribió:

> > Too bad -- I hoped you would *write* the notes... ;-)
> 
> When I find a list of sources for features, I can do that... 
> 
> But for that I first have to know what changed. 
> 
> The problem of the ChangeLogs I see at the moment is, that they are
> far too deep into the system for me to understand (the same goes for
> the commit messages). 
> 
> And which ChangeLogs are relevant? There are I-don't-know-how-many of
> them floating around, but the changelog inside /hurd seems to note
> just the changes of files in that directory. 
> 
> 
> Maybe some coders could write a short list with the most relevant
> changes which I could use as base to write release notes. 

Well, for 0.3, the amount of changes is so great that it probably
doesn't make much sense to list them all. Rather, the release notes
should only contain a general description of the status; what doesn't
work, and what works only with hacks or experimental patches not in the
trunk yet.

For the followup releases, a listing of changes would make sense. But as
I already said, I don't think that can easily be obtained after the
fact. Rather, someone would need to track the mailing list (and perhaps
IRC), and note down all changes mentioned -- perhaps on a wiki page. If
things are unclear when putting together the release notes from that,
the one doing it would have to ask the develepers involved.

As you observed yourself, the changelogs are generally not useful to
understand what changes where made...

-antrik-