Re: Including the release notes in the git-1.5.0 release?

From: Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>
Date: Feb 13, 2007, 18:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20070213180541.GH8670@thunk.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vzm7ix895.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 09:44:22AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> As the text assumes familiarity with git 1.3.0 or so, I am not
> sure if making it as one of the manpages makes much sense.

Yeah, that's a good point.

> Also there is a question of what to do when 1.6.0 comes out.
> Will its release notes replace 1.5.0 one?  If so changes from
> which version will it describe?

What I've seen some projects do (including some commercial products) is to keep them around with the old file names. So if we have

Documentation/RELEASE-NOTES_1.5.0.txt Documentation/RELEASE-NOTES_1.6.0.txt Documentation/RELEASE-NOTES_1.7.0.txt

and a symlink from RELEASE-NOTES to Documentation/RELEASE-NOTES-<cur_ver>.txt

that would make a lot of sense....

> and have pointer to v1.5.0.txt from Documentation/git.txt would
> be a sensible and easy thing to do.

The only reason why I suggest Documentation/RELEASE-NOTES_1.5.0.txt instead of Documentation/v1.5.0.txt is that it might not be as obvious what "v1.5.0.txt" is for someone just looking at it in the Documntation directory, where as "RELEASE-NOTES_1.5.0.txt leaves no doubt.

But keeping the the old release notes around is good both for people who are upgrading from older versions, and it also means that for someone who wants to answer the question, "suppose we want to enable feature <foo>", what which older versions of git clients will be breaking.

(I was about to suggest that we just break the older git clients using dumb http protecols on kernel.org, befure I realized that that meant breaking git clients that were released last August. Whoops; it's amazing how much improvements git has seen in the last six months, that it seems a lot longer ago... :-)

							- Ted