Re: [flame] NEWS file is useless

[Riccardo Mottola]

David Chisnall wrote:
> On 25 Nov 2009, at 22:39, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> I'd be in favour of ditching NEWS and ChangeLog.
>
> ChangeLog has less information, in a less useful format, than the svn 
> logs and is a hold-over from CVS not storing repository-wide change 
> information sensibly.  With svn log, you can get a log of change 
> messages at any granularity that you like.  If anyone actually cares 
> about ChangeLog then they can do 'svn log > ChangeLog' on their local 
> machine.  Stuff in the svn log can be processed easily, and is easier 
> for people to check than the ChangeLog, for example:
Well, I disagree.
The utility of NEWS is questionable, but ChangeLog should be preserved. 
Not only in a ChangeLog I can write more than in a commit and I can 
group files and comment on sigle pieces of them, but it is an easy file 
I can check.
Also, ChangeLog gets released, so it is available in the end-suer 
release tarball.


ReleaseNotes may contain comments about incompatibilities, deprecations 
of methods, upgrade procedures...
NEWS is perhaps more geared towards notable end-user readable things 
like new features, big fixes. It is perhaps more useful for an 
Application than the library.

Riccardo