[Releasing] [Development] Changelog for 5.0 (Was: Content freeze for Qt 4.8.3 approaching)

[marius.storm-olsen at nokia.com]

On 10/08/2012 01:54, ext Kent Hansen wrote:
> On that topic: How should we proceed in preparing the changes file
> for 5.0? Should there _be_ a unified changes file for 5.0? (I noticed
> that there's no changes-4.0.0 file; guessing that's because the leap
> from Qt 3 to 4 was so huge (e.g., in terms of source-incompatible
> changes) that an incremental change documentation didn't make sense.
> Can we use the same excuse for Qt 5? :-/ )

Not since the Alpha.


> In the olden days, it used to be the responsibility of each developer
> to add his contributions to the changes file when a release was
> drawing near. Admittedly, this was not everyone's favorite activity,
> having to dig through your own ~half year old commits. Some steps
> were taken to ease the process (I think it was Harald who wrote a
> nifty tool that would find all your commits and let you strike them
> off the list as you went and added changelog entries), but there was
> still a fair amount of release manager nagging and developers'
> moaning before it got done. [1]

The tool was nice, but I'm not sure it would work in an OSS setup.


> On the other hand, in order for someone other than the developer
> that did the change to create the changelog entry, the bug
> summary/description and/or commit message need to be of pretty high
> ("user-centric") quality (which I'm sure is the case in many, but
> perhaps not all, cases). It's probably manageable (as you've shown)
> for the types of changes going into 4.8, but 5.0 is a different
> beast.
>
> So my question is: Should I wait for Some Magic Guy (Lars, is that
> you?! ;D ) to make the 5.0 changes file materialize in pristine form
> by next month, or should each developer, or at least module
> maintainers, get involved somehow? How will it be handled for
> subsequent minor and patch releases? With Qt now being an open
> project, certainly the release manager can no longer play the "It
> comes with the job, now write the changelog dammit!"-card to all
> contributors.

No, but he can do that to all the maintainers, and the maintainers can 
figure out how they best can organize it for their modules.


> Lastly, I'll note that having the changes-5.0.0 file in qtbase seems
> strange; is that file supposed to include changes to other modules,
> such as qtdeclarative, as well? Would qt5.git be a better place for
> it? Should each module have its own changes file that some script
> combines into a final one?

As each module per design live their own life, and can be released 
individually at different times, I think it crucial that they each have 
their own changes file. For an SDK release we can simply merge all the 
changes files from all the submodules. Maybe that requires each module 
to follow som reporting scheme so the changes file sub-blocks are merged 
intelligently, I don't know. Let's discuss :)

-- 
.marius