[Sugar-devel] Distributors mixing across Sugar branches (Was: Terminal v25 (attention distro managers!!))

[Jonas Smedegaard]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 12:43:04PM +0200, Morgan Collett wrote:
>On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:12, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
>> - From a distributor point of view, it would be nice to be able to 
>> look at the Homepage of each part of Sugar (sugar-toolkit, 
>> sugar-base, sugar, hulahop, Browse, etc) and see not only a download 
>> link for the latest and greatest release of that piece, but a 
>> download link for the latest and greatest release for *each* of your 
>> development tracks (i.e. currently 0.82, 0.84 and "bleeding edge") 
>> and also a brief note on which changes are not backwards-compatible.
>
>+1
>
>Also publishing the changelogs for each release would be good - 
>currently they seem to be only sent in the release announcement mail.


With the risk of writing stuff that you all know better than me 
already, let me elaborate a bit on that:

There is several levels of "changes".  In Debian we may have the 
following, for each single software package:

  * VCS commit notes, describing each atomic edit
  * Changelog entries, grouped per release
  * NEWS items about eventual major changes, grouped by release
  * Status pages, tracking newest events for each branch
  * Long description, describing the product in few sentences
  * Short description, describing the product in one line

I probably forgot some.

Above list is ordered in after how often it typically needs updating. 
(yes, short and long descriptions are also a form of status info: Debian 
Sugar packages currently mention that Sugar is mostly for XOs ;-) ).

An important issue (that I thankfully haven't noticed abused at 
Sugarlabs but frequently in Debian) is that each and every item in above 
channels should be somewhat self-contained.  It is ok to reference 
external resources (like bug-number being closed) but it is wrong to 
write "Fixed earlier problem properly now" without mentioning *what* 
problem it is, in the entry itself.


  - Jonas

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAknTUBkACgkQn7DbMsAkQLjvHwCeJpui2oc8eYzIeLGzJVLY2ZxI
69UAoJX+VBL7FI689W5sUtWiBKjdLF11
=xHeu
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----