Hello, during the release process of version 1.1.0, issues with the management of our release notes surfaced. The current process requires the release manager to review all past commits before a release and assemble a list of release notes. I see two issues with this approach:
1. A single person might miss an important commit. 2. Issues blocking a planned release might be noticed too late. While #1 might not look so significant, I'd like to encourage a community approach and share this task along multiple people instead of putting the burden on a single person. This reduces the chance of a commit being overlooked and increases the chance that a person familiar with the topic is able to rate the significance of the change. For #2, I'd like to refer to the discussion about making the current release 1.0.1 or 1.1.0. Background for the switch to a minor version change was the matter of the fact that API changes have been missed and were only discovered during the release preparation. In future, cases like this would be easily noticeable by checking the future release notes. I'd request everybody to vote for the following proposal: "The committer merging a Pull Request must review changes in terms of their significance for a future release and must add an entry (title and PR#) to the future release notes in case this significance is met. Categories might be 'New Features', 'Bug-Fixes', 'Fixed Security Vulnerabilities', 'Performance improvements', 'API changes', 'Deprecations' and 'Usability improvements' (taken from [1]). The title of this entry might be subject to change during the review process of the upcoming release. Active wiki-pages for upcoming releases (major, minor and patch) must be marked as [WIP]." I have created a wiki-page for the following release at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MXNET/%5BWIP%5D+Apache+MXNet+%28incubating%29+1.2.0+Release+Notes. After 1.1.0 has been released, we'll have to create another page for 1.1.1. Any committer might add an entry in the style of https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MXNET/Apache+MXNet+%28incubating%29+1.1.0+Release+Notes . Voting time frame is finished 72 hours from now until February 2, 06:00 AM UTC. Best regards, Marco [1]: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MXNET/MXNet+Release+Notes+Template
