[Gretl-devel] new tracker for incompatible changes

[Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti]

On Tue, 6 May 2008, Allin Cottrell wrote:

> On Fri, 2 May 2008, Sven Schreiber wrote:
>
>> quickly @b: I'm not sure right who may edit it. I have set some
>> permissions, where the six gretl developers I could identify in
>> the sourceforge list are made admins of that new tracker. I'm
>> not sure what that means for regular (logged-in) users, it would
>> be nice if someone who's not in the sourceforge gretl developers
>> list could test.
>
> I wonder if we might be better with a cvs-controlled log of
> incompatible changes, much like the current ChangeLog.
>
> I've done a mock-up of this; it's not linked to from the main
> page, but you can find it at:
>
> http://gretl.sourceforge.net/Backward.html
>
> Any thoughts on the relative merits of these approaches?

I like the Changelog-style better. Pros:

a) no spam involved

b) it's rather easy to look for stuff: you open the web page, and 
everything is there. If in the future the list greows, all you have to do 
is press Ctrl-F and you're pretty much done.

c) requires very little maintenance, but more or less the same holds for 
the SF tracker

d) optionally, it can be turned into an Emacs-style "forward-incompatible 
unfeatures" (if you have no idea of what I'm talking about, never mind, 
it's an in-joke)

Cons: none I can see right now.

While we're at it: the Changelog is nice, but not exactly newbie-friendly. 
For the next release, it'd be nice if someone volunteered to write a 
"Release Notes" page, more or less in the style of Abiword's 
(http://www.abiword.org/release-notes/2.6.0.phtml) or Gnumeric's
(http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/announcements/1.8/gnumeric-1.8.shtml).

There are several people on the devel list that I think would do an 
excellent job (Sven, Andreas, Talha, to name but a few).


Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Economia
Università Politecnica delle Marche

r.lucchetti at univpm.it
http://www.econ.univpm.it/lucchetti