One of the things I really like about some software projects is when they provide an actual changelog or release notes. RabbitMQ released 1.7.2 the other day and I asked the developers if they could link to a changelog. They pointed me to this page. Unfortunately this is not exactly what I had in mind. To me, a changelog is a brief overview of the changes in a version that is digestible by the end user. The key factor is that a changelog is not machine-generated but written by a project developer for the project’s users. The RabbitMQ changelog is far too verbose (one entry per commit, along with merge noise).
Here’s a few examples of good changelogs: memcache-client, Java, Nokogiri, Resque, Redis.
Personally I consider a changelog one of the best indicators of a well run OSS project. If you run an OSS project, please consider supplying release notes or a changelog so that other developers can follow your project with ease!
Update: looks like I just missed the changelog for RabbitMQ. Alexis was kind enough to point me to the release notes in the comments.
4 responses so far ↓
1 alexis // Feb 20, 2010 at 1:50 am
Mark,
Would our *release notes* provide what you are looking for?
http://lists.rabbitmq.com/pipermail/rabbitmq-discuss/2010-February/006353.html
Cheers,
alexis
2 Dave S. // Feb 20, 2010 at 7:15 am
LShift posts these to the list in the release announcement, and links to them from the news page.
http://www.rabbitmq.com/news.html
I just googled “rabbitmq release notes”. It came up as the top item.
3 mperham // Feb 20, 2010 at 8:28 am
@alexis, I don’t know who Mark is but I’m glad to see y’all have release notes. It was hard for me to believe that such a large project didn’t have them!
@Dave, thanks for the tip!
4 alexis // Feb 20, 2010 at 10:22 am
Mike,
s/Mark/Mike
My most humble apologies!
alexis
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