Doing away with changelogs

[Alexandra Ellwood]

It sounds like the problem people use the Changelogs to solve is  
"what change introduced this new behavior I don't like."

I suspect this need would be fulfilled by just improving our release  
notes so that they list all the bugs fixed and the svn commit lines  
to show what files were impacted by each change.  Associating each  
change with a bug number would in fact be an improvement over the  
Changelogs since you'd know what bug needs to be reopened/referenced  
once you discover which change broken things.

Given the size of our project such a list would have to be  
autogenerated and provided separately from the overview list in the  
release announcement email -- at least in major releases.

If one of the people asking for this functionality wanted to  
contribute a more sophisticated release notes generation process for  
our release which provides the content they need, I suspect we would  
be happy to consider it for inclusion in our release process.  Our  
entire developer community has access to the systems necessary to  
write these scripts (svn repository, RT bug tracking database).  Even  
if we don't end up taking such a system you can still provide your  
own release notes for our releases.


--lxs

Alexandra Ellwood <lxs at mit.edu>
MIT Kerberos Development Team
<http://mit.edu/lxs/www>