KDE 4.1 Changelog?

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Wednesday 04 June 2008 04:40:04 Robert Knight wrote:
> > We'd need to comb through the svn log anyways, and I think we'd get
>
> > a better ChangeLog if developers put a little bit of work toward
> > updating their part of the ChangeLog instead of having a couple of
> > people poring through the svn log between each release.
>
> True, it won't catch every fix but presumably everything marked with
> BUG:XYZ should be accounted for.  For those of us using git/bzr etc.
> locally getting a list of bugs fixed between two releases is trivial.  

For BUG, this could be extracted from the commit log even (a lot like Danny 
does in the commit digest). You find entries with BUG, look up the bugnumber 
and note bug#, title and link down. "You" is a script, of course.

> > Perhaps we can make that easy by making a tool
> > to add the commit message to the ChangeLog automatically.
>
> As Maks said earlier, commit messages can be quite technical.  I see the
> ChangeLog as something which should be mostly readable by a KDE-aware
> audience (keen users, packagers, developers of other KDE projects,
> people involved with non-development areas of KDE) who might not
> actually understand the inner workings of a particular project.  For
> this audience, it is quite useful to be able to see changes separated
> into optimisations/features/bugs etc. at a glance - much like the Commit
> Digest.
>
> The ideal flow of work might go something like this:
>
> 1.  Get raw KDE 4.X <-> 4.(X+1) changelog for application Foo (from SVN)
> as a reference.
> 2.  Developer summarises into local changelog (might happen during or at
> the end of a cycle)
> 3.  Script combines all the app changelogs together at the end of a
> cycle.
> 4.  Publicity team use the combined output to put together a pretty
> guide for KDE 4.(X+1)

I think this would help a lot, and at the same time make it easier for 
developers to keep track of changes. In fact, I'm not even sure everybody can 
commit to the XML changelog, since it's in the www directories and there's an 
ACL in place.

In the end, that would help us writing better, more informative, more clear 
and also more fair release notes. It tends to be the same teams who fill the 
changelog all the time, and going through SVN logs is really nothing the 
promo team has the resources for (did that once, for only one part ... :/).
-- 
sebas

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