Re: [flame] NEWS file is useless

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 25 Nov 2009, at 20:21, Wolfgang Sourdeau wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> 
> This morning, I have inadvertently updated gnustep-base on my Debian machine, 
> which remained at version 1.19 since april this year....
> To my surprise, I have found at least two unannounced changes:
> - the property list format is now serialized directly in XML, which is 
> somehow useful.... or, well, maybe not.

Not sure what you mean here ... I don't think property list format should have 
changed ... I haven't noticed a change.

> - the NSZoneMallocAtomic function has been removed, causing SOGo users to 
> fail in compiling SOPE

Yes ... that's gone as part of the process of matching the OSX garbage 
collection API.

> Surprise, surprise, the NEWS files does not list any of those changes.

I believe it mentioned garbage collection API changes.

> Moreover they happened during a minor update of the library.

Yes ... but a minor update of the unstable (1.19) branch rather than the stable 
(1.18) branch.  You need to expect much more radical changes than that on the 
unstable branch!

> Let me tell you this kind of unannounced changes are totally unpleasant (and 
> an IRC channel does not count for announcing those).

There are actually three levels of change information ...
NEWS  ... just the headlines
ReleaseNotes ... some more detail
ChangeLog ... everything

Maybe you are right and we shouldn't bother with NEWS?  I'd be interested to 
know what others think.