[erlang-questions] minor releases in Erlang?

[Michael Truog]

On 12/04/2014 06:18 AM, David Welton wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 9:14 AM, Michael Truog <mjtruog@REDACTED> wrote:
>> Even just a simple announcement that a new tag exists could help it receive
>> testing.  That could make these minor updates more of a real "open source"
>> release, due to public communication that encourages its use publicly.  The
>> extra testing would help us determine when an Erlang release will not fail
>> in testing or production due to bugs.
> +1 - although it would not be hard to automate that ourselves:
>
> https://api.github.com/repos/erlang/otp/tags
>
The problem with only trying to check if a new tag exists is not knowing all the changes that went into the new release.  We can go through every commit message to determine all the changes since the source code changes are public.  However, the erlang repository tags would be much easier to use if the changes were summarized in release notes.  If we had a public bug/feature tracker that had a direct relationship with the final release notes (currently the README file, e.g., http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_17.3.readme), this would not be a problem. Many of the changes are not attached to github issues and no clear relationship between the release notes OTP-##### identifier and github issues is shown, so it makes tracking changes in the repository more difficult than you would expect from an open source project.  I understand that OTP-##### identifiers are sometimes mentioned in the branch name with commit messages that describe what the changes relate to, though that 
is unable to clearly describe the impact of the change (its relationship to other OTP-##### identifiers, what requirements or expectations may have changed, and the larger impact to the system for the developer).