On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 4:21 AM, Jason McDonald <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 1:05 AM, Oswald Buddenhagen > <[email protected]> wrote: >> as some certainly noted, the completeness of dist/changes-* severely >> deteriorated over the last few minor releases, and in particular 5.0.0 >> is one of the poorest qt changelogs seen in a while. >> >> also, sergio is now attempting to make 5.0.1 changelogs in a heroic >> one-man-effort - not entirely surprisingly, this turns out to be a tad >> more tedious than planned. > > I was quietly wondering to myself how long it would take for someone > to notice that I stopped acting as editor for the changelogs when I > left Nokia. > > As Sergio has no doubt discovered, manually generating the changes > file is a tedious and time-consuming process, particularly when the > level of co-operation from developers is low to non-existent. > > [...] > > So, based on my bitter experience, here are my recommendations: > > 1. Let's acknowledge that writing the changes file is going to have to > be a manual process due to the complexity of the decision-making and > the lack of a strict development process.
Yes, it will have to be an ultimately manual process. But I like how your later suggestions provide hope that tools and processes can make the manual part easier. > 2. Let's agree that module maintainers should be responsible for their > module's changes file, and clearly document that responsibility on the > part of the wiki that lists a maintainer's duties. +1. Release manager would still be responsible for chasing them up though ;) . > 3. Let's call for volunteers to prototype a new changelog tool along > similar lines to the old one, but this time with a better UI, the > ability to share data between users via a git repo, and some kind of > checklist to assist the decision-making process. I'm happy to help > with setting requirements, but I regret that I won't be able to do > much more than that as my new full-time job does not involve Qt. I'd start playing around with a QML prototype (nothing I love better ;) ) but requirements like "better UI" are too vague to even get started. Especially since I can't recall what the old Trolltech tool looked like. Could you flesh out initial ideas a little more, so potential volunteers could prototype their prototype? > 4. Let's try to make the job of our maintainers that little bit easier > by writing good commit summaries and diligently reviewing the commit > summaries of our peers. +1, but I think the tool is a more realistic way of making the task easier for the maintainers. -- Alan Alpert _______________________________________________ Development mailing list [email protected] http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development
