At 03:18 PM 2/6/2006, Eric Wachsmann - FlexRadio wrote:
Jim,
In the near future, we will have an SVN server for the PowerSDR source.
This will allow public access to view each and every revision to all
source files (along with hopefully good notes about why the changes were
made). I expect that this will help significantly with what you are
asking for.
My experience has been that you have to beat on and force the developers to
come up with a meaningful description of the change, or else, they wind up
just parroting whatever "diff" came up with: "Changed line 45 to reference
alternate pointer" which is too detailed, and "fix bugs", which is too
generalized..
On the other hand, the release notes are directed at our general
customer base and there was a conscious decision made to keep them
readable (to some degree) by non-developers.
I figured that this was the case.
For this reason, very
early on, we decided not to include which files changed per release
note.
Perhaps the best way to handle this is to have the detailed information (in
the module, for instance), and then, have some person (you?) prepare the
public description of "what's changed in this release". Clearly, the level
of detail in a .x beta release is going to be different than in a x.0
production release, and I can't think of any automated way to do this,
because so much relies on a feel for what the "conceptual level of
understanding" is for the target audience.
I think SVN is the answer here. We will have to revisit what our
release notes will look like after we have the SVN server as it will not
help with non-developer customers.
If there is a desire, down the road, to actually provide a platform for
useful software radio experimentation, this kind of thing will be quite
important.
Eric Wachsmann
FlexRadio Systems
Jim
