+1, I agree with Grant's comment. I also like the simplicity of having a text file, separate of JIRA. What I find quite often (we use JIRA at work, and deploy our open source software on various projects) is that folks don't know what JIRA is, or care, but they like having a text file that comes along with the release that they can refer to, and at least get a high level view of what's going on in terms of updates and features for a release. Sure, JIRA can generate that file for you, using the release notes, but like Grant said, it takes out the (some guy X via some committer Y), or (some committer Y) comments, which are nice to give folks credit. The decision was made a while back on Tika to remove @author tags from the source b/c of the fact that credit was given in e.g., CHANGES.txt and JIRA...
My 2 cents, Chris On 12/15/08 11:19 AM, "Grant Ingersoll" <gsing...@apache.org> wrote: > We dropped it for Mahout and did like in the link below, but one thing > I don't like about it is it gets harder to give credit to (and > identify) those who chipped in, but maybe aren't listed as the > Reporter/Assignee on the issue. For example, it is often the case > that someone reports, someone else generates the patch, and yet > another person commits it. > > On Dec 14, 2008, at 4:54 PM, Jukka Zitting wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> We use the CHANGES.txt file to record all the issues that have been >> fixed in the codebase. However, the same information (and much more) >> is already conveniently accessible in Jira, see for example [1] for >> the 0.2 release. Would anyone mind if we just dropped the CHANGES.txt >> file? >> >> Alternatively we could repurpose it as a higher level release notes >> file that records more substantial changes in more detail. For example >> instead of just one-liners with just the bug titles, we could for >> example include a paragraph or so for each notable API or >> configuration change and just refer to Jira for the less notable >> changes. >> >> [1] >> https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=12310631&sty >> leName=Html&version=12312902 >> >> BR, >> >> Jukka Zitting > > > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. Senior Computer Scientist NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246 Email: chris.mattm...@jpl.nasa.gov WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Disclaimer: The opinions presented within are my own and do not reflect those of either NASA, JPL, or the California Institute of Technology.
