Draft: simple update description guidelines

Chris Weyl cweyl at alumni.drew.edu
Thu Jan 29 00:35:00 UTC 2009


On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> It appears, most maintainers only have been ignoring the description
>> fields or not filling them properly because of lack of documentation or
>> awareness on how it is being used.
>
> Some of the replies in these threads don't quite suggest that. People
> complain about the "bureaucracy" of being "forced" to write such stuff,
> which pretty much shows they intentionally do not want to fill in those
> fields and won't do it if they can get away without it.

Actually, some of those people are pointing out that this is another
new manual task:

1. Of "questionable usefulness";
2. That most users won't read[1]; which
3. Duplicates the upstream changelog; and
4. Could easily be remedied by providing pointers to the upstream
website and changelog in the installer GUI.

To put it another way, some people are complaining that they actually
have to read the UPSTREAM changelog to determine what UPSTREAM
changed, instead of having the changes summarized and spoon-fed to
them.

To-date, I haven't seen any comment back on my suggestion of pulling
the changelogs out automatically and providing a link + the package
URL link in the GUI.  If CPAN can make README's available like this,
why can't we?  And why isn't this a happy middle ground, providing
detailed upstream change information without another new manual task,
at least worthy of a try?

                                            -Chris

[1] You know, it strikes me that it'd be interesting to see what % of
our users actually run through the update list, rather than just see
the little popup and clicking "update now".  Do we track this, and
maybe we should collect some statistics on this before wasting any
more time with this thread?

-- 
Chris Weyl
Ex astris, scientia




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