Rely on JIRA for release notes ?

[Ian Young]

On 22 Jul 2014, at 22:23, Tom Zeller <tzeller at dragonacea.biz> wrote:

> I guess my question is : should we rely on JIRA for generation of
> RELEASE-NOTES.txt ?

If you mean automatically generated release notes, derived from JIRA's facility for doing this, I'd say emphatically NO. A list of addressed issues is not the same as release notes, even if you're very careful about issue titles (which as Scott points out we really aren't right now).

Real release notes might *point* to the JIRA auto-generated "release notes", but the primary goal of good release notes is to summarise the story of the release.

> Of course, I can just manually copy
> the one-line JSP-46 issue to the release notes for Spring Extensions
> from Java Support,

That's what I'd do.

> but I was wondering if we should generate
> RELEASE-NOTES.txt from Subversion, since that can be automated.

I would strongly recommend we not go there. I am pretty sure we'd find that it can be automated, but we'd spend a huge amount of time (re)discovering that it can't be automated *well*.

> Also, I think it probably is a good idea to choose a "standard" format
> for RELEASE-NOTES.txt across the various projects which depend on
> parent-v3

I'm quite happy with the *format* of the JIRA-generated release notes page, if you wanted to take that as a starting point.

> which should include the date and Subversion revision number
> of each released version.

No, that's what tags are for; let's not duplicate that functionality.

	-- Ian



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