Including the release notes in the git-1.5.0 release?

Including the release notes in the git-1.5.0 release?

[Theodore Ts'o]

Junio,

I noticed that the file v1.5.0.txt is still in the todo branch, but not
in the actual main git branch.  I assume that this means you were
planning on including the v1.5.0.txt in the git announcement, but not
necessarily including it in the actual git 1.5.0 tarball?

As a suggestion, maybe it would be a good idea to actually include it as
RELEASE-NOTES in the top-level source tree of git.   This will make it
much more likely that people packaging git will include in
/usr/share/doc/git.  

Or better yet, maybe we should include it in the Documentation directory
and set it up to be built as a manpage, git-release-notes.  This will
make it much more likely that end users who are getting git from their
Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, et. al distribution will actually see the
release notes when they install the new package.

What do you think?

						- Ted

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

[Junio C Hamano]

"Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu> writes:

> As a suggestion, maybe it would be a good idea to actually include it as
> RELEASE-NOTES in the top-level source tree of git.   This will make it
> much more likely that people packaging git will include in
> /usr/share/doc/git.  
>
> Or better yet, maybe we should include it in the Documentation directory
> and set it up to be built as a manpage, git-release-notes.  This will
> make it much more likely that end users who are getting git from their
> Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, et. al distribution will actually see the
> release notes when they install the new package.

Indeed I was planning to use it as the announcement message, but
including it in the final tarball sounds sensible.

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.

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?

I suspect that doing something like:

	git cat-file todo:v1.5.0.txt >Documentation/v1.5.0.txt
	ln -s Documentation/v1.5.0.txt RELEASE-NOTES
        git add RELEASE-NOTES Documentation/v1.5.0.txt

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

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

[Theodore Tso]

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

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

[Junio C Hamano]

Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> writes:

> 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....

Done.

I used to like reading pod/perl*delta.pod but these days they
are tooooo long.  Hopefully we can keep our release notes short
and sweet. 

People might already have noticed that the latest docs at

	http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/

has link to older versions.