[Coin-discuss] begging for changelog entries

[Hart, William E]

Ted:

As an end-user of various open-source packages, I never have looked at commit logs and/or RSS feeds.  They're simply too low level a data stream to provide qualitative information about the state of a code (e.g. frequency of releases, nature of code updates).

I think that it would be reasonable to include the requirement that COIN-OR packages include a NEWS or CHANGELOG file.  A minimal expectation for software releases is simply the documentation of the dates of various releases...  Although this would impact existing projects, it would be easy to go through and create such a CHANGELOG file for them.

--Bill


-----Original Message-----
From: coin-discuss-bounces at list.coin-or.org [mailto:coin-discuss-bounces at list.coin-or.org] On Behalf Of Ted Ralphs
Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2009 2:13 PM
To: Sebastian Nowozin
Cc: coin-discuss at list.coin-or.org >> Discussions about open source software for Operations Research
Subject: Re: [Coin-discuss] begging for changelog entries

I agree this is something we could do better at overall. The
Foundation's Technical Leadership Council can develop some recommended
best practices, but it is up to the individual project managers to
implement them. In any case, I will make it a priority to see what we
can do to improve the situation, as this is a comment we have heard
before. Something that is in the works in the near future is a new Web
site that will include blogs and other ways to get news out there more
easily. This alone should make things much better. Major releases
should be announced on the mailing lists, but I agree they frequently
are not.

I know it's not exactly what you want, but with Trac, you can get RSS
feeds of project activity. It's pretty easy to follow what's going on
that way, though I guess it can be a little too much information.

Cheers,

Ted


On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Sebastian Nowozin <nowozin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> Soeren Sonnenburg wrote:
>
>> seeing a couple of minor updates in many coin-or packages, it would be
>> great if some short changelog lines would document what has changed.
>> Would that be possible please?
>
> I second that wish.  There is so much great work and developing
> happening in many of the COIN-OR packages.  But most of these are
> visible to the COIN-OR developers only, in the form of the svn log.
>
>  Why not have a NEWS file as many open source packages have (GLPK for
> example), that summarizes the main points of each release in a few
> lines, much like a high-level ChangeLog.  The description of the changes
> could be understood by end users and they can consider upgrading.
>
>  (Also, announcing new releases would be merely a copy-paste email from
> the coarse changelog.  Are major releases of COIN-OR packages announced?
>  I have only seen Ipopt announcements in the past.)
>
> Regards,
> Sebastian
>
> _______________________________________________
> Coin-discuss mailing list
> Coin-discuss at list.coin-or.org
> http://list.coin-or.org/mailman/listinfo/coin-discuss
>



-- 
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Associate Professor, Lehigh University
(610) 628-1280
ted 'at' lehigh 'dot' edu
coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted


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