[rfc] news layout tweak

[Karl Fogel]

Vincent Ladeuil <v.ladeuil+lp at free.fr> writes:
>     jam> Running bzr.dev and you hate change? :)
>
> +1 :-)
>
>     jam> What if we just put them at the top, in a 'changed since rc1', but
>     jam> without a major heading.
>
> +1 

This is a major improvement, but there is an argument for not listing
RCs at all in the release notes:

The audience for release notes is all users of Bazaar, which should be a
much larger group than those who download the RCs.  So taking a poll on
the Bazaar mailing list suffers from selection bias: anyone who would
even read such a thread is more likely to be interested in RCs than a
normal user would be :-).

(This assumes the poll asks "What would you like to see?" rather than
"What do you think most users would want to see?" -- two very different
questions.)

Release candidates are an implementation detail in the process of making
a release.  While they involve some users (testers), they are not of
interest to most users, and for that majority, they are a distraction if
listed in the release notes.

Instead, how about the release notes for an RC simply be the (draft)
release notes for the non-RC release they lead up to.  For example, the
release notes for the current 1.13rc1 would be:

  http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.1.13/en/release-notes/NEWS.html#bzr-1-13

...and that section would simply have a prominent notice at the top,
pointing out that the official release isn't out yet, and that we're
currently on the first release candidate, 1.13rc1.

(Note I've also taken the date off, to make relnotes URLs constructable.)

I'm happy to post a patch for this, if people like the idea: that is, a
patch for NEWS, and the appropriate edit made to the front page of
bazaar-vcs.org once that patch is applied.

Thoughts?

-Karl