On 1/3/2013 12:27 PM, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
BTW, Changelogs looks extremely naked now, I think release notes are really needed now. Al least for new features. Is far from ideal to make people go through a bug report to know how they can adapt their code to new features.
On the other hand, the older way of doing changelogs routinely missed a *lot* of things. Relatively few people doing the pulls would bother to log the changes. I think there were easy double the number of changes showing up in the search than were in the log.
And sometimes bug reports are not updated on how things turned out, for example #7041[1], a feature I implemented myself. The bug report is outdated AFAIK, the title talks about a -di flags which doesn't even exist, you actually have to go through the pull request[2] to see what the hell is going on. And even then the behaviour of that pull request was changed in a subsequent one[3], and there are no visible links between those 2 pull requests.
Please update that bugzilla issue. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, this method does require upping our game with bugzilla tags, titles, and descriptions.
I don't see that it is any *harder* to update the bugzilla issue than it is to provide a brief summary in the changelog.
As for what's new, the failure here is the failure to document those changes. This is not a failure of the changelog - it's a failure of the documentation pages. The bugzilla should have a link to the relevant documentation.
I do *not* think that a changelog new feature entry takes the place of updating the documentation, and I do not agree with writing the documentation twice (changelog and documentation).
Anyway, at least for this particular change, the changelog is basically useless, and I don't think the bug report is the right place to inform users about compiler changes.
We've been using bugzilla for a long time to organize enhancement requests.
Users don't care about the history and discussion around a change, they just only want to know how to take advantage of new features and how to fix their code (possibly with some exceptions of course, in which case they can still go back to the bug report and pull requests).
I agree this new system is imperfect - but I argue it is better than what we were doing before.
