Please create more detailed changelogs & bug reports

[Admonstrator]

Hi there,

at the moment I'm a little bit unhappy about the changelogs. In fact no one knows what happend to the product if theres a notice like "This is a maintenance release to fix reported issues." Even with new minor versions (like 4.1.6) the changelog isn't detailed enough. So some of my apps crashed because something changed - and I don't know why this happens and what change cause this.

If it's possible (yeah, I know it costs time) a more detailed changelog would be awesome. If it's a bugfix just link to the solved issues within the bug tracker so everyone can understand which bugs are fixed now. It would be nice too if you would create bug reports for bugs mentioned by ticket. I think that this would be a right move into transparency of the development process and would provide a better overview to your customers.

Thanks,
Admonstrator

 

[Lindy]

I'm sorry, it's just not realistic to detail every bug fixed in the public release notes and it's not an entirely efficient use of resources to spend as much time documenting changes as performing the changes. Other than our versioning system, there is no central "this is what was done" list -- the bug tracker is only half of the picture. The other half of fixes are applied by developers on a support level (tickets) -- they do not log a bug report in the tracker for tickets if it can be immediately fixed within protocol; they fix it and move on to the next. Code reviews are then conducted by the development team based on the commits. Those logs really aren't intended for public consumption and it would be quite tedious to extract them into a list format and ultimately, there's little reason to do so... I know I for one see an update, see things were fixed and then update. I feel most are that way - I'm not particularly interested in a comprehensive list of things that were fixed and most private software companies don't provide that luxury. 

If you're a developer, you may wish to use dev tools like diff to extract code changes to see what may be relevant to you - at some point, we may be able to look into automating this if there's strong interest. If you're using a third party app and it's not working with a new version, it's best to contact that third party author for assistance. 

Also keep in mind, as far as the bug tracker is concerned, you can use the version filters in the bug tracker to get a list of what was fixed in that release. You can also get a glimpse into what was patched on a support level by looking in the knowledgebase. 

We've begun alerting third party authors of sweeping changes as we make them so they can be prepared for the next release - hopefully that will reduce the number of broken applications on upgrade. 

[Hexsplosions]

I like the current system.

I was quite vocal about the lack of visibility of which bugs were fixed in which release, so IPS listened and changed the current bug tracker to address this lack of visibility. It gives many of us the visibility we desire without, I hope, being too resource intensive for IPS. I'd much rather time and attention be focused on fixes than on creating lists of fixes. I'm still loving the frequency at which updates are being released, bug fixes are so much faster now compared to the 3.4.X series.