Re: [Tails-project] writing the release notes for 1.3

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Autor: anonym
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A: Public mailing list about the Tails project
Assumpte: Re: [Tails-project] writing the release notes for 1.3
On 19/02/15 18:05, sajolida wrote:
> sajolida:
>> Until now, whenever a new version of Tails was released, we would write
>> release notes. But I think that they were too technical to be
>> informative to our users.
>
> By the way, I'm not trying to criticize the work done by release
> managers until now (especially anonym) because it is awesome!


I think it *is* a valid critique you are rising but I'm not taking
offense or whatever if you're worrying about that. :)

> I'm merely proposing to try a process to collectively improve on the
> phrasing, being a bit more verbose and user oriented. As RM are pretty
> busy with many other things, and as many other contributors and testers
> would bring their own view on the changes made and how to explain them
> to a board spectrum of users.


Sounds great! Would this include RC's release notes?

However, on a more technical note, I think it may be hard for you to
know what to write in it since the changelog generally is prepared quite
late in the release process, and if you are gonna try to keep track of
what's going on you'd duplicate the work of the RM to a large extent.
However, there's a solution!

Me and intrigeri talked briefly that it'd be great to have a folder
called "changes", either in the Git tree root, or in the "debian"
directory, just like in Tor's git repo:

    https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/changes


So, the idea is that in each bugfix/features/test branch we'd introduce
some file that contains the exact changelog entry the branch would
introduce, including the section(s). Such a file would be *required* for
the branch to be merged.

Not only do I think this would greatly improve the quality of the
changelog entries (since they're written by the branch author) and
reduce the RM's stress at image building time (currently I spend 1-2
hours on the changelog which could be spent on other things, like
earlier testing), but it'd help you with drafting the release notes in
the future.

What do you think? Others? I'd be super happy to start with this
immediately after the 1.3 release if we can get a quick consensus.

Cheers!