Re: Re: Octave 3.8.1 Released

[Mike Miller]

(trimmed the cc list)

On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 14:56:48 -0700, Sergei Steshenko wrote:
> Working for several companies in the industry I had to prepare release
> notes explicitly stating what has changed and for what reason.

That is one possible way to prepare release notes, when the audience has
an interest or a customer requires such a document listing every
detailed change. GNU Octave has no such customer requirement.

Also note that the GNU Octave release announcement and its NEWS document
have never claimed to be "release notes" by your definition.

> Which yet another time proves my point that the release note is
> useless other than the fact that 3.8.0 was replaced with 3.8.1.

Not quite, there was one line in the 3.8.1 release announcement that was
not in the 3.8.0 announcement that you did not mention:

>> Version 3.8.1 is a bug fixing release.

No new features or large user-visible changes appear between 3.8.0 and
3.8.1, thus there is nothing suitable to mention in the NEWS file or in
the release announcement.

> Another issue - I do not use 'hg' revision/version control system and
> thus do not have it installed. So, in order to obtain a meaningful
> release info I first need to install a revision/version control
> system?

You can equally read the file "ChangeLog" which is always distributed
with the source release and lists every detailed change that was made as
part of the 3.8.1 release, and prior releases. I suspect this may be
closer to the level of detail you are looking for.

HTH,

-- 
mike