Re: [PATCH] Git release notes man page

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 18, 2014, 22:14 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqha7wcbkz.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <1392460179-776-1-git-send-email-philipoakley@iee.org>

Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> A few days too late for the 1.9.0 release cycle :(
>
> This responds to Stefan Nwe's request for a 'git help' command that would
> access the release notes. ($gmane/240595 17 Jan 2014).
>
> I've used the full name "release-notes" for the help guide rather than
> Stefan's original 'git help relnotes'.
>
> The release-notes man page lists just the notes for the current release.
> The combined notes for all releases is nearing 15k 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. I do not understand why it is even a good idea to show release notes from the command line "git" interface.