Difference between revisions of "Releases:Release Notes System"
(commit the first part of this, since the power gods have not been smiling) |
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| + | <big><b>How to (draft and structure and combine and) create release notes for a new version of Camino</b></big> | ||
| + | <br /> | ||
| + | by Smokey Ardisson | ||
| + | <br /> | ||
| + | on 2007-08-15 | ||
| + | |||
Camino uses three basic styles of release notes: the Milestone style, the Final Release style, and the Security and Stability Update style. Each of these styles varies slightly in format, structure, and language. This document explains the system finalized during the 1.1/1.5 release cycle. | Camino uses three basic styles of release notes: the Milestone style, the Final Release style, and the Security and Stability Update style. Each of these styles varies slightly in format, structure, and language. This document explains the system finalized during the 1.1/1.5 release cycle. | ||
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The Milestone style consists of 3 major sections, “About Camino® ''N.n Milestone''” (with the ®), “Features in Camino ''N.n Milestone''” (without the ®), and “Known Issues”. A new Features section is prepended for each subsequent milestone, e.g., Camino 1.1a1 will have one Features section, but Camino 1.1b might have 3, one for the 1.1a1, 1.1a2, and the topmost Features section for 1.1b. | The Milestone style consists of 3 major sections, “About Camino® ''N.n Milestone''” (with the ®), “Features in Camino ''N.n Milestone''” (without the ®), and “Known Issues”. A new Features section is prepended for each subsequent milestone, e.g., Camino 1.1a1 will have one Features section, but Camino 1.1b might have 3, one for the 1.1a1, 1.1a2, and the topmost Features section for 1.1b. | ||
| − | ===About | + | ===About Camino® ''N.n Milestone''=== |
This section contains a paragraph highlighting the main areas of change since the previous Final Release, a paragraph of caution tailored to the Alpha or Beta (with slightly different wording), a single sentence paragraph about Firefox/Gecko compatibility, and, where necessary, a final paragraph directing users of a no-longer-supported OS version to the last Security and Stability Update version for their OS. | This section contains a paragraph highlighting the main areas of change since the previous Final Release, a paragraph of caution tailored to the Alpha or Beta (with slightly different wording), a single sentence paragraph about Firefox/Gecko compatibility, and, where necessary, a final paragraph directing users of a no-longer-supported OS version to the last Security and Stability Update version for their OS. | ||
| − | <div style="border: 1px solid blue; padding- | + | <div style="border: 1px solid blue; padding: 5px; background-color: light grey; margin: 10px;"> |
===About Camino® 1.1 Beta=== | ===About Camino® 1.1 Beta=== | ||
Camino 1.1 Beta is a heavily-updated version of the only native Mac OS X browser using Mozilla.org’s Gecko HTML rendering engine. Notable improvements include enhanced tabbed browsing (“single window mode”), integration with the Mac OS X spell-checking system, detection of RSS/Atom feeds, an improved design for the “blocked pop-up” notification, enhanced options for cookies and downloads, and a resizable search field in the toolbar. This release also includes enhancements in speed, security, and rendering accuracy brought by version 1.8.1 of the Gecko rendering engine. | Camino 1.1 Beta is a heavily-updated version of the only native Mac OS X browser using Mozilla.org’s Gecko HTML rendering engine. Notable improvements include enhanced tabbed browsing (“single window mode”), integration with the Mac OS X spell-checking system, detection of RSS/Atom feeds, an improved design for the “blocked pop-up” notification, enhanced options for cookies and downloads, and a resizable search field in the toolbar. This release also includes enhancements in speed, security, and rendering accuracy brought by version 1.8.1 of the Gecko rendering engine. | ||
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Due to changes in the feature set, Camino 1.1 Beta no longer supports Mac OS X 10.2. We advise users still running Mac OS X 10.2 to [http://www.caminobrowser.org/download/releases/1.0.3/ download Camino 1.0.3] ([http://www.caminobrowser.org/releases/1.0.3/ release notes]).</div> | Due to changes in the feature set, Camino 1.1 Beta no longer supports Mac OS X 10.2. We advise users still running Mac OS X 10.2 to [http://www.caminobrowser.org/download/releases/1.0.3/ download Camino 1.0.3] ([http://www.caminobrowser.org/releases/1.0.3/ release notes]).</div> | ||
| + | |||
| + | ===Features in Camino ''N.n Milestone''=== | ||
| + | List, by functional area. Don't include functional areas which have no checkins. Keep the list of functional areas consistent within a release cycle. | ||
| + | |||
| + | ===Known Issues=== | ||
| + | |||
| + | List. Updated with each subsequent milestone. Try to prune all but most serious carry-over notes from previous release. What qualifies a bug to be a known issue? Major, often not ours, common problem. | ||
| + | ==Final Release style== | ||
| + | |||
| + | ==Security and Stability Update style== | ||
| + | |||
| + | This basically replaces the About section and appends a set of lists for each subsequent s&s release. Also changes Known Issues, if applicable. Try to keep changes light (repeat same texts in lists where possible) for l10n. | ||
Revision as of 19:45, 15 August 2007
How to (draft and structure and combine and) create release notes for a new version of Camino
by Smokey Ardisson
on 2007-08-15
Camino uses three basic styles of release notes: the Milestone style, the Final Release style, and the Security and Stability Update style. Each of these styles varies slightly in format, structure, and language. This document explains the system finalized during the 1.1/1.5 release cycle.
When the Final Release and Security and Stability Update notes appear on the website, there are slight layout changes involved, but the format and structure remain essentially the same. A fourth, website-only, style is the “Complete Release Notes”, which consists of all the Milestone notes for a given release plus any relnote-worthy changes between the last Milestone and the Final Release, in a slightly different format (this supplements the normal Final Release style notes for a version by providing a comprehensive changelog-style notes).
Contents
Milestone style
The first style is the Milestone style, used for alpha and beta milestones. This style is the most informal and consists largely of a component-ordered list of changes since the last final release or milestone. These changes are drawn from the respective Releases:N.n:Notes pages, which in turn are “branched” from the “running release notes” page for the release, Releases:Release Notes N.n. The wiki pages list all “relnote-worthy” changes since the last final release (or the last milestone). To be “relnote-worthy,” a checkin typically has to be a user-facing feature addition, behavior change, or bug fix.
The Milestone style consists of 3 major sections, “About Camino® N.n Milestone” (with the ®), “Features in Camino N.n Milestone” (without the ®), and “Known Issues”. A new Features section is prepended for each subsequent milestone, e.g., Camino 1.1a1 will have one Features section, but Camino 1.1b might have 3, one for the 1.1a1, 1.1a2, and the topmost Features section for 1.1b.
About Camino® N.n Milestone
This section contains a paragraph highlighting the main areas of change since the previous Final Release, a paragraph of caution tailored to the Alpha or Beta (with slightly different wording), a single sentence paragraph about Firefox/Gecko compatibility, and, where necessary, a final paragraph directing users of a no-longer-supported OS version to the last Security and Stability Update version for their OS.
About Camino® 1.1 Beta
Camino 1.1 Beta is a heavily-updated version of the only native Mac OS X browser using Mozilla.org’s Gecko HTML rendering engine. Notable improvements include enhanced tabbed browsing (“single window mode”), integration with the Mac OS X spell-checking system, detection of RSS/Atom feeds, an improved design for the “blocked pop-up” notification, enhanced options for cookies and downloads, and a resizable search field in the toolbar. This release also includes enhancements in speed, security, and rendering accuracy brought by version 1.8.1 of the Gecko rendering engine.
Note that this version is in the “beta” stage, which means that it is close to its final shipping state. We feel that it is usable on a day-to-day basis and is a large improvement over Camino 1.0, but you may still experience bugs and some functionality may not work entirely as intended. The goal of this release is to demonstrate the team’s progress and to allow users to report problems before the final release.
Camino 1.1 Beta shares the same code base as Firefox 2.0, both being based on Gecko 1.8.1, and thus shares many of the security fixes and Gecko improvements that are in that version of Firefox.
Due to changes in the feature set, Camino 1.1 Beta no longer supports Mac OS X 10.2. We advise users still running Mac OS X 10.2 to download Camino 1.0.3 (release notes).Features in Camino N.n Milestone
List, by functional area. Don't include functional areas which have no checkins. Keep the list of functional areas consistent within a release cycle.
Known Issues
List. Updated with each subsequent milestone. Try to prune all but most serious carry-over notes from previous release. What qualifies a bug to be a known issue? Major, often not ours, common problem.
Final Release style
Security and Stability Update style
This basically replaces the About section and appends a set of lists for each subsequent s&s release. Also changes Known Issues, if applicable. Try to keep changes light (repeat same texts in lists where possible) for l10n.
