[vlc-devel] VLC ChangeLog

[Christophe Massiot]

Dear friends (and others :),

We have ceased to update the ChangeLog for a while now, and anyway even
if we had continued updating it, it would currently be absolutely
unreadable due to the amount of irrelevant lines ("fixed trivial mixer
I broke yesterday !").

With 0.5.0 release closing in, we must definitely do something. There
are two conceptions of a ChangeLog:
1. A CVS log (some people even instruct their CVS wrappers to update
the ChangeLog automatically),
2. A features log ("new Preferences panel").

My opinion is that option 1 is useless. I mean, it's useless to
incorporate all the small changes done to the repository ("implemented
vlc_object_find()"), because the user doesn't care at all how things
are done, and it drowns real changes under a 10000 tons load.
Additionally, if some freak (or developer, or both) wants to get all
the small changes, cvs log is your friend (or the vlc-devel mailing-
list).

Therefore I think we should only keep relevant feature changes in our
ChangeLog. This also means it will take less time to update it, so there
are better chances that it will be up-to-date for the next release. For
instance, instead of having 1000 lines of changes for what I did to the
audio output, one entry sums them all up:
* New audio output architecture, allowing to:
- choose the audio device and channel configuration at run-time,
- support devices with more than two channels or with S/PDIF output,
- do less aggressive resampling,
etc.

Besides, I think we should keep the list sorted hierarchically and by
category. Categories are "Core", "Codecs", "Input formats", "Mac OS X
port", etc., and inside those, entries which are more important should be
put on top. For instance :

Mac OS X port:
* Brand-new controller window, more intuitive,
* New Preferences panel,
* New "Close Window" menu item

Any thoughts ?

-- 
Christophe Massiot.
-- 
This is the vlc-devel mailing-list, see http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
To unsubscribe, please read http://developers.videolan.org/lists.html
If you are in trouble, please contact <postmaster at videolan.org>