Hi all,
Our current release note strategy is clearly not working.
Too many times do people omit it. Either because they consider the
commit not important enough for release notes or because it is a pain
to do due to the continuous merge conflicts. Not to mention fix-ups
and small clarifications are often annoying to do. It also often
results in inconsistent formatting of the notes as everybody does it
differently.
For this and other reasons[1], I'd recommend we stop updating release
notes through git commits in a separate file.
For more details see Proposal 2 on this page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Release_notes_automatio…
It is important that we settle quickly and perfect later since this is
affecting our current release cycle already.
In case people worry about the scalability of the approach, I'm
willing to take this on for the near future. However I'm convinced we
have enough people who care and will filter the incoming stream on the
wiki page. Simply look at the git history of release notes files (I
expect at least Reedy and hexmode will naturally be drawn to this).
-- Krinkle
[1] Other reasons include keeping the change atomic and easy to
backport. For what its worth, Git[2], Nodejs[3] and many jQuery
projects such as QUnit[4] already maintain release notes this way.
[2]
https://github.com/git/git/commit/v1.8.2.2
[3]
https://github.com/joyent/node/commit/v0.10.5
[4]
https://github.com/jquery/qunit/commit/v1.11.0