Thursday, August 2, 2007

What's in a noteworthy keyword?

I remember in the past, as an Eclipse user, looking at the New and Noteworthy document for each milestone with glee. It was something to anticipate when each Eclipse milestone was released... you thought to yourself, what cool stuff will be in this milestone?

Now, as an Eclipse committer, I'm on the side of generating some of these New and Noteworthy items. I have created a bug requesting that a new keyword be added to bugzilla called noteworthy. The purpose of this keyword is three-fold:
  • Make it easier for committers to tag what items they think are noteworthy. A common workflow for committers towards the end of a release is to scan the bugs fixed and pick and choose noteworthy items. I think we can improve this.
  • In the best interest of transparency, our users (and even our committers) would like to see where noteworthy items come from and to be easy to query what's new would be great.
  • For people like the EMF team who like to automatically generate release notes with each release, this can be a way to mark specific bugs as noteworthy ones.
So, if you're a committer or even a user who think this would be useful, please comment on the bug. If you're a committer on a project that doesn't publish these new and noteworthy type of documents, I highly recommend it as it's something your consumers may enjoy to read.