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!
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!
Comments
As a developer I try to do this for any software I'm in charge of releasing.
The biggest issue which you pointed out is that most of them still forget that non-technical release notes is important. I don't know much about inner working of git, but surely want to know about which bugs have been fixed and what new features are added. I might not need all the new features, but probably once in a while, one or two features might become useful
It bothers me when I see packages with no notes! C'mon! If you don't take the time to tell the user what changed why should they take the time to update their software?
First of all, the example you provide (Git), is actually a counter-example.
The Git project doesn't have any NEWS file. It does in fact have release notes, but as you can see from the link, those are actually ignored by the Fedora packagers.
It seems the actual text is provided manually by the packager in the "update information".
1. If you don't follow the usual convention (NEWS file), there is a very good possibility that people assume the information doesn't exist and hence "ignore" it.
2. I did not only stressed the maintainer to provide the release notes but also the packager to use it when it *is* provided.
3. I wrote this blog entry after talking to a guy who does a lot of packaging for fedora and he not only agrees but complained that he is sick&tired of stressing this to upstream maintainers and getting ignored.