OK - I’ve always wondered this so I’ll ask…
I receive emails from our Discourse instance telling me a “New version” is available.
It has a link “See what’s new in the Release Notes…”
But when I click the link, there is no mention of that new version and its release notes.
Look here - it said New version is 2.5.2 but now look at the screen the link points to - do you see any mention of 2.5.2 release notes?
So instead of helping me, the link frustrated me.
Is this just me?
2.5.2 is stable, minimal changes, the new versions are beta.
Thanks - but just so we are in sync…
The link says it takes me to the 2.5.2 release notes. But it does not. No where in that link/page does it mention 2.5.2 release notes.
Same thing happened last announcement.
We don’t typically do release notes for stable updates because they are usually extremely minor changes, only absolutely essential backported bugfixes etc. It’s possible you could pull the stable changes out of GitHub via a special link, perhaps @jomaxro has an idea.
We generally recommend that you stay on tests-passed, all our customers / hosting are on tests-passed.
Jeff is correct, I don’t write release notes for stable releases. The email you received is a standard email, shared by all Discourse instances. It doesn’t know what branch you’re on.
Stable point releases only include critical bug fixes and security patches. Unlike our normal releases, which contain hundreds of changes, stable point releases generally have less than 10, many times far less.
You can see all the changes at https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commits/stable. Look for “Version bump to v{current version}” and “Version bump to v{previous version}”. Anything between that is the changes. In the case of v2.5.2 there are 7 changes. 3 security, 2 follow ups to the security changes, and 2 critical performance fixes.
Understood. Your reasoning for not doing release notes for stable releases kinda makes sense. My sole point is that MANY of us receive email notifications and MOST of the time the Release Notes link has nothing to say. One option is to change the template to better set expectations rather than me being teased and usually clicking to find nothing related to the email I just received.
If it were our product, I would take 10 minutes to create a Release note for every release.
Simply saying “This is a minor release. Low risk. Mostly bug fixes. But we did change how xxx is handled if you want to be aware of that improvement or potential impact.”
Anyway - I’m good.
I propose the standard version update email template be updated:
Take
"See what’s new in the release notes "
and change to
“Rummage through these release notes and try to figure out what is in this new version since there are no release notes for this version”
Background
Received another email today that 2.7.1 is available and to see the release notes link which does not have a release note for 2.7.1. Link should be helpful or omitted.
Hey Bill,
We had some internal discussion. As I assume you’ll understand we’re not going to change the copy to what you proposed. While we still recommend that sites stay on tests-passed, as is default, we’re going to create release notes for the stable releases moving forward. Note that the notes will not include the same level as detail as the normal release notes, as stable bumps only include critical bug fixes and security patches.
Very good. I apologize for being snarky but when I get the new release notice I immediately want to click the link to see how this release may impact my users and how much of a priority it is to upgrade etc.
But I’m always left frustrated that the link does not do that and in most cases, there are never documents with the same version number referenced in the upgrade. So now I must decide how much time I should put into searching for documents specific to the release etc. Obviously a document with “beta” or an earlier release number could be significantly different from the final release so those documents are of no use to me.
Thanks for moving this forward.
For future reference, the effective changelog for a major stable bump, such as 2.5.0, is the sum of all beta releases that start with the version: 2.5.0.beta[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. We strive to keep the “beta” versions usable at all times, and our “stable” branch is more focused on lack of change than lack of bugs.
Hopefully the patch release notes help out with the confusion.
Release notes for the last 2 stable patches are up.
