On 2/17/2013 7:36 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
On Sun, 17 Feb 2013 21:44:18 -0500, Walter Bright <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 2/17/2013 6:11 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
Let me give you some examples of "new features"
std.array.replace compile error (string and immutable string)
There's no Duration.max
Document extern properly
etc.
Compare the earlier changelogs with the bugzilla entries.
It's EXACTLY THE SAME TEXT.
EXACTLY.
No. We have quite a few messages that were not "bug reports" in prior
releases. These messages have no corresponding bugzilla entry. These were
truly useful descriptions. The bug reports were few, and yes, there were a few
instances like the ones I gave (I saw "relax inout rules" which is terrible as a
description).
for example:
* std.array.insert has been deprecated. Please use std.array.insertInPlace
instead.
* Major overhaul of std.regex module's implementation. Breaking change in std.
regex.replace with delegate, use Captures!string instead of RegexMatch!string
as delegate parameter.
The latest versions have almost none of those useful descriptions. They are
almost exclusively of the cryptic
you-have-to-click-on-me-to-understand-what-I-mean type.
All that's necessary is to edit the title description. I've done that on a few
of them.
Even if there are past examples of poor descriptions for the changelog, that is
not not an excuse to make them all bugzilla reports.
It is no more or less effort to fix the bugzilla titles than it is to edit the
changelog.
A good first step would be to examine the bugzilla reports that will be listed
as "new features" (should be easy since it's a report that's already being used
by the web site), and change the descriptions to real useful enhancement
descriptions before the release. But I think the release needs a hard copy of
these descriptions.
I understand many people do not like the change to the changelog - but I ask
for a reason that make sense. I keep hearing that the text is different, but
that is simply not so. It's the same exact information. Even the categories
are the same.
I did a search for the above two examples in bugzilla, and I found nothing.
Clearly, this is not the exact same information.
With the new system, all changes should have a bugzilla entry for them. With the
old, there were occasional vacuous statements in the changelog with no links to
any discussion or just what it was.
Look at the changelogs that list an issue number. All of them have the exact
same text as the corresponding bugzilla title. I know they're the same because:
1. people requested that they be the same
2. I created them using cut & paste
With bugzilla entries for each item in the changelog, you have:
1. a title
2. discussion
3. link to the pull request that shows the code that changed to implement it
Also, anyone can go in and change the bugzilla issue titles to make them more
readable.
That actually is not a good thing... Anyone can maliciously affect the
changlog, or alter the changelog at some later point because they wanted to
'reopen' a bug.
I know that there is the potential for malicious behavior, but thankfully we
haven't seen any of that. If we do, we'll have to restrict write access to
bugzilla. That'll be a sad day.
If someone wants to step up and take charge of doing a better job with the
changelog, I'm all for it. The old way was NOT a better job. It was usually left
to me (and Jonathan) to try to cobble something together. When I was the only
committer, I'd edit the changelog as things got changed. With the larger number
of committers today, this got overlooked. The result was incomplete, inaccurate,
and a lot of belated "hey, you left out these changes" after the release.
