Philip TAYLOR wrote:
announcements that are not factually correct are a waste of
everyone's time -- the sender's, and that of all those who seek to
make use of the announcement.
Well, an announcement is text, written by a human being and made for
reading by a human being (or multiple). Even if something is factually
incorrect in there, it won't result in a complete lack of understanding
unless the reader chooses to take individual phrases more serious than
others in the same context. Example:
"For a more complete list of major changes [2] in SeaMonkey 2.14b3"
By now, if you followed the "[2]" link, you'd already found what changed
between 2.14 betas. The "changes" page is the one where changes in
between betas and minor releases are documented. This has been like that
for any release since SM 2.2, i.e. 13 (in words: thirteen!) releases.
For the same amount of time, only *major* changes have been listed on
the main Release Notes page [and probably the same is true for 2.1, I
just didn't check it in detail due to the length of the list].
Now, after the part quoted above, the announcement continues:
", see the What's New in SeaMonkey 2.14b3 section of the Release Notes [3]"
So, as you noted, this is factually incorrect since there is no section
with "2.14b3" in its heading. But, honestly, did you really fail to find
the information just because you took the text (again, created by a
human being, and we tend to make mistakes!) literally? Didn't it appear
to you that following the (all!) links either in the announcement or the
Release Notes page could lead you to the answers you were heading for?
Hard to believe, or otherwise sad.
When a new version is released, what is new/fixed in that release is
by far the most important information necessary to accompany it.
Agreed. The SeaMonkey team, especially me, is investing a large amount
of work into compiling this information. It appears to me that it is
only the placement of and linking to that information that we're having
a controversy over here.
If that information is not yet in place, and/or linked from the
relevant document, then announcement of the release should be placed
on hold until such time as those loose ends have been tidied up.
We usually have the relevant information available from the start, and
this time was no exception.
Premature release announcements serve only to bring the project into
disrepute, and to cast doubt on the care with which the release has
been prepared.
If the information is not available right away (and as I already said,
this was *not* the case this time!), then that's usually due to the lack
of time of one of the contributors (usually me). I think this only
happened with some initial betas in the past, and releasing the product
(including its security and other fixes) promptly was found more
important than providing the details from the start.
Perhaps a dedicated channel targeted solely at those who are
interested in beta- releases would be of benefit here.
Maybe. AFAIK there are no plans for that right now, though. I don't even
know who administers mailing lists and news groups. Someone at Mozilla,
I guess.
Greetings,
Jens
--
Jens Hatlak <http://jens.hatlak.de/>
SeaMonkey Trunk Tracker <http://smtt.blogspot.com/>
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