Upgrading and releases
Hi,
I want to suggest two more and related things which are done quickly and
improve things a lot.
The first one is the introduction of a document called "UPGRADING" or
similar which lists incompatible changes made. These include changes of
default values, additions of options/commands, additional features and
all that sorted by date like so:
2006-01-01
The option $foo has been added.
The reason is that people going with CVS versions can easily see what
important changes were made before doing an update (if this document is
also published on the web which is no problem view viewcvs linked from
dev.mutt.org).
Something like this is used by FreeBSD and even with muttng we made very
good experiences. Also nice to have: making up a release announcement is
as easy as picking the highlights and sort them by topic instead of
going through the whole ChangeLog file. It also helps people searching
for certain features.
Going through the whole ChangeLog file is boring and time consuming, but
someone would have to do this for the next stable release anyway...
Somewhat related is my second idea (though I don't know if the ChangeLog
file is distributed but if); we could stop manual maintainance of
reldate.h and let Makefile pick the date from the first line. This would
be a great improvement as many people seem to use 1.5.x series and there
neither the version number nor the release date really help.
I don't really know how autoconf handles the dependencies when no
reldate.h is present, but a dummy file could still do, I guess.
Any ideas and comments?
bye, Rocco
--
:wq!