Re: [PATCH] Git release notes man page

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 19, 2014, 18:22 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqha7v9d4e.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <1EC26D492ABB45FF8C399F84B1E30817@PhilipOakley>

"Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

>> RelNotes are incremental and only useful for those who know what the
>> immediately previous release contained, but for most people who get
>> their Git from distros, I have this impression that the versions of
>> Git they get skip versions, and seeing the notable changes since the
>> previous source release will not give them wrong information---they
>> may have this warm fuzzy feeling that they know what is going on,
>> but they are missing information on all the accumulated changes that
>> were added in earlier versions their distro skipped---these changes
>> are still in the version they are running.
>
> That's a reasonable argument.

I am not making an "argument" in order to reject the notion of making release-notes available, though. I am only raising concerns, pointing out why showing a single release notes as if that were the only one that matter is misleading.

I am not opposed to the idea of making release notes available to those who do not install from the source, by the way. Being able to grep the release notes through may help people who are writing scripts using Git to learn when a feature they want to use appeared to make sure that they do not depend on something their users may not have yet. But for that kind of users, it would be more helpful to point them at the file location they can find the plain text version of release notes, instead of giving them a bunch of web links they need to read through page by page.

> I did look at trying to get the
> "stalenotes" to work as an alternative, that is extract the stalenotes
> section from the git.txt, and create a release notes man page from
> that.

I am not sure if stale-notes section meshes well with this; the primary purpose of it was to point at the whole documentation set, not just release-notes, for versions previously released, so those who came to a website that hosts them can pick the version, possibly a stale one, that they are using and read the manual pages for that version, without seeing newer features that are not available to them. I do not think it is very useful in the context of your "You received this single version of software, and you can access its documentation off-line" feature---you cannot reasonably expect that such a software release to contain all the past documentation sets, but even if you could do so, that is not how normal people use the installed documentation, i.e. to learn about older releases that they no longer have.