20 Jun 2011 zeenix   » (Journeyer)

Release logs are important!

Turns out that not many Free Software maintainers follow the practice of writing proper release logs targetted for packagers/end-users. To justify their laziness, they come-up with lame excuses like "Oh, the user never sees the release log" etc and at the very most copy&paste the (developer oriented) VCS changelog since the last release. Here is how it actually affects a user:


Now if you click on the URL provided, you will be taken to a page where there is a lot of information but the one you are looking for: What exactly changed? In this particular case, its just an bugfix release but many times new features are added and users can't know that unless you put that nicely in your release log.

So please stop justifying your laziness and take the efforts to write the release log if you are a maintainer of a Free Software project. OTOH, if you are a downstream packager, please copy or link to the upstream release log in your package's changelog that upstream maintainer has put his/her time/efforts into. Thanks!

Syndicated 2011-06-20 16:00:00 (Updated 2011-06-20 18:18:28) from zeenix

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