Git release notes

[Nicolas Sebrecht]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 05:34:52PM +0100, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 10:13:28 +0100, Philipp Haselwarter <philipp.haselwarter at gmx.de> wrote:
> > I just cloned from github because the latest binary package for my
> > distro is v6.2.0, and I felt a bit lost:
> > - there's no INSTALL file
> > - no NEWS
> > - no ChangeLog
> > - no Git-release-notes
> > - UPGRADING got its last update "Date:   Sat Apr 16 20:33:35 2005 +0100"
> 
> > Please don't be sloppy with these things. In the light of the discussion
> > on splitting the list between users and devs, I think it should be clear
> > that there *are* some users out there who do not read every mail on the
> > list and who don't feel like digging through the git log.
> 
> As you might well have noticed, did maintainership just switch over to
> Nicolas. While I certainly cannot speak for him or his plans.
> 
> Also he send a release mail with what has changed for both 6.3.0 and
> 6.3.1, so we are not totally left in the dark. With git changelogs I
> don't think it makes sense to maintain a very detailed CHANGELOG file,
> some high-level information in the release announcements are good though
> (and he has done that, not sure if that information should be put in
> some file somewhere too).
> 
> Overall I think we are still in a phase where we re-establish and adapt
> workflows to suit all committers and maintainers best. We are looking
> forward to your contributions in helping us get there :).

Exactly.

I'm gone a bit far than that since I removed _all_ the previous
changelog files done for debian. Perhaps I should remove the UPGRADE
file, too.

The install informations _exists_ but is currently lost in the manual.
I'm working on this. The coming documentation will be (at the root of
the repository)

  - INSTALL.rst
  - FAQ.rst
  - MANUAL.rst (used to build the installed man page)

all readable at github. Also, we are still keeping the "self-documented"
configuration file strategy (for configuration files only, of course).

Where are the changelogs? We don't have ones except the announcements I
do (and will do) here by mail on releases. I expect from people able to
'git clone' the repository followed by a manual install to know how to
read history (aka 'git log VERSION..'). I ask contributors to write
_good_ commit messages for the others, really.

-- 
Nicolas Sebrecht