Re: Emacs 28.2 released

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>
> Cc: stefankangas@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2022 14:53:43 -0500
> 
> >> We have an entry in NEWS for 28.2.
> >> 
> >> That entry has a substantive item about an installation change. 
> >> There are also a couple of items listed under "Changes in 
> >> Specialized Modes and Packages in Emacs 28.2" (although one of 
> >> them says that the change was actually released in 28.1 and 
> >> that 
> >> we just forgot to include it in the release notes then).
> >
> >These are not the bugfixes whose list you wanted to see.
> 
> Sure it is.  It's good enough -- and presumably that's why we link 
> to it from the 28.2 section on 
> https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/emacs/emacs.html#Releases 
> .

Are we talking about the email announcements or are we talking about
the Emacs Web page?  They are two different media, and I thought you
were talking about the former.

The email announcement of a major release (in this case, Emacs 28.1)
has this text:

  For a summary of changes in Emacs 28.1, see the etc/NEWS file in the
  tarball; you can view it from Emacs by typing 'C-h n', or by clicking
  Help->Emacs News from the menu bar.

  For the complete list of changes and the people who made them, see the
  various ChangeLog files in the source distribution.  For a summary of
  all the people who have contributed to Emacs, see the etc/AUTHORS
  file.

AFAIU, you wanted to have there an HTML link to the NEWS file, is that
correct?  If so, I can suggest adding to the above text the link to

  https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/etc/NEWS?h=emacs-28

Would that be okay?

One subtle issue here is that when we post the email announcement
about a new release, the on-line manuals and the Emacs Web page are
not yet up-to-date, so either a link to anything inside the Web pages
will be outdated, or we will need to delay the announcement until the
Web pages are updated, both of which are undesirable.  A link to Git
above is thus a compromise that doesn't have these disadvantages.

> All I'm saying is that the announcement email should contain the 
> *same link* that the above page contains.

See above: that'd delay the release announcement, sometimes by days,
depending on the free time of the people who do these updating jobs.

> While the blurb for 28.2 may not be a complete list of bugfixes, 
> it is still useful, both in what it contains and in its position 
> at the end of an easily-navigable long line of past release notes.

As explained already, that blurb is not a list of bugfixes at all.  It
is a list of noteworthy changes in the release, and in minor releases
it is usually very short, sometimes includes "old news" from the
previous releases that we just forgot to mention, and could even be
empty.  I don't especially mind having that referenced in the email
announcements, but if that satisfies your request, I really wonder
what was all the fuss about.

> >You keep changing the request on every step.  It is very hard to 
> >have
> >a useful discussion this way.
> 
> I have been making the same request in every single email.  My 
> original email contains the same proposal I am making above:

No, it didn't, not in this detail and accuracy.

> >Is that correct?  Or do we have a misunderstanding again?
> 
> I don't understand how you got that from what I wrote, but it is 
> not what I said.

As already mentioned, it is hard to understand what exactly are you
saying.  Apologies for not being better at that.

> My suggestion is simply this:
> 
> Every release announcement email -- major or minor -- should have 
> a link to the corresponding online release notes.

If by "release notes" you mean the NEWS file, this can be done,
although I question the usefulness.  If you mean something else, then
we don't have any "release notes" in Emacs; however the Emacs Web page
does show a list of the more important new features in each major
release.

> That single link is enough to satisfy readers who want to go 
> looking for more detail.

What is this assertion based on?  I understand that doing so will
satisfy you, but how do you know it will satisfy others?