user-oriented news

[Martin Pool]

On 12 October 2010 00:51, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
> I don't think I've ever heard this advice before. Especially the
> "quoting the error you get" part.

You may well be right.

Do you think it's a reasonable policy?  If so, I'll see about
describing it more clearly in the docs.

> These were also never clearly defined to me. I always felt that Internal
> changes were a bit unclear and just put everything into Compatibility.
> Certainly that has always been the advice on Merge Proposals ("that
> needs a section in Compatibility", never "that needs a section in
> Internals")
>
> I think I only used Internals for *new* apis. Stuff that people might
> want to use, but not stuff that might 'break'.

I think internals should be "things people developing bzr or plugins
would want to know about", perhaps changes in the way we do things.
Even then perhaps that's better put into updates to the developer
guide.

Looking back over the entries under "internals" that exist today, most
do not have much value.  They are either too small, or they're really
bug fixes or performance improvements, or api breaks.  Therefore
perhaps we should delete it.


> Maybe it was covered in HACKING, I'll certainly admit that I don't
> really read that document, vs just using experience-to-date from being
> part of the project.

That particular document is too big, but also people doing ongoing
work aren't likely to sit down and read it just to see what's new...

-- 
Martin