The Loss of Changelogs

notRobot

I have stopped trusting automatic software and operating system updates, they take away useful features or break functional user flows or introduce unwanted AI slop too often. So I am very much back in the boat of software needing to justify an update for me to install it.

eschaton

The NetBSD developers keep a great CHANGES document up to date with what’s new overall, and even categorize it by architecture and machine when appropriate. Want to know what changed between 10.1 and 11? Or 10.0 and 10.1? It’s all right there, summarized by the people who did the work.

K0nserv

I have a slightly different take on the loss of changelogs, although I agree with the version in this post. My gripe[0] is developers using GitHub’s “releases” feature in lieu of a CHANGELOG.md. This feels particularly pertinent in light of GitHub’s recent performance woes. 0: https://hugotunius.se/2024/01/20/stop-using-github-releases....

gruensk

I always use changelogs and try and link all changes to a pr. I don’t expect people to have to troll through dozens of individual per release notes. Why this has become a lost art is very mysterious to me unless it’s just laziness? From working in mobile release pipelines, my experience with release notes was that the app stores (esp Apple) would nitpick release notes and hold up releases on a regular basis, so we went to generic release notes to avoid being blocked at approval on the Apple side. Pretty good example of a reverse incentive.

Grombobulous

The author thinks the changelog is important and that their customers should read it, even going as far as adding it as a forced pop-up. Arguably, that’s quite a hostile form of changelog. It’s great to have changelogs available but your customers absolutely don’t care about them, especially if they are not corporate customers. The article author has a lot of pride in each release: genuinely a wonderful thing, but not anything that is relevant to the person at the other end. That’s why so many apps on the App Store have change logs that say something like “Thanks for using our app.” They wouldn’t even release a changelog if they weren’t forced to do so by the platform and their customers’ devices update in their sleep. They’d never see a changelog even if a detailed one existed.

phoenixy1

Changelogs are really difficult to do properly. The concept of a "release" is fuzzy in a world of continuous deployment, and feature flags and experiments mean that different customers are seeing different features. The release of the client that can support the feature is often very divorced from the enablement of the feature. This is not a new phenomenon and has been something we struggled with way back in 2013 in my first SaaS job. Even if you do have a defined set of changes, the way modern software releases work means that the changelog is often the only reason to collect and document those all in one place, and not always a sufficiently compelling one to justify gathering and coordinating this information across teams in a large organization. Anyway, time to go go see if Claude's done drafting that changelog I asked it to do...