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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!