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**Jerod Santo:** So you're trying to bring up a convergence similar to that around changelogs, right? That's kind of the idea, it's like "We can all just converge on this one format, we can all decide that changelogs are important things that we need to try to do well..." |
**Olivier Lacan:** Right. |
**Jerod Santo:** So let's assume that you've talked me into that and I'm like "Okay, I'm a developer, I wanna keep a good changelog, I'm down with this format that he's proposed...", there's still a few things that I think are difficult, and maybe you can help navigate that... The first one being "When do I add to my c... |
Then question two - you say it's a curated list of things... So how do I decide what's worth putting in there and what's just noise? |
**Olivier Lacan:** The first part is every single release. If you don't have something notable, you can say "No notable changes." This is something that I'm glad you asked, because this is something I hadn't really answered yet on the site... So I'll probably add that. So "When should I do that?" "All the time." |
It's very unlikely that you're going to make a release, or cut a release, or push a release if you don't have any notable changes. It's extremely rare. There might be some bug fixes, but even those bug fixes you can say "Okay, we had a few bug fixes - about what?" It just takes you just really quickly parsing through..... |
\[40:04\] As a maintainer, why not put in there and say "Hey, if you're going to fix a bug, please make a changelog entry. A bunch of open source projects do that. Then there you go - every minor release now has a changelog entry that says "Okay, we fixed this bug. Nothing else was added, so you can be relaxed, because... |
The second part of your question was -- can you remind me? Because I've lost your second part. |
**Jerod Santo:** Deciding what goes in and what's not worthy of going into the actual entry. |
**Olivier Lacan:** I think we discussed it a little bit earlier. If this is something that people as end users will send you packages with poop inside - if they find out and you didn't do it... It's such a simple check. |
**Jerod Santo:** Are you speaking from experience there? |
**Olivier Lacan:** No, but I would do it. \[laughter\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I like how you went there... Like, "If they send you hate mail, that's cool. But packages with poop in it - bad." |
**Olivier Lacan:** Imagine your GitHub profile on open source projects had your address in it. Would you be cool with that? Well, that's another issue that may be really creepy... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Chad might. |
**Olivier Lacan:** Yes, Chad would. But imagine that people could actually send you mail, physical mail, and it could be dangerous because they could put poop in it. Would that happen with this release because you forgot to mention something? I think the poop test is a great test; I might actually add that -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think your idea though of putting stuff in it that breaks it... I'm thinking of -- when I upgrade Wordpress plugins for the site, or different sites that are still in Wordpress, or whatever... Whenever I've gotta bump up that plugin, I mainly don't care about new features they add, I mainly care i... |
I've had plugins totally break a Wordpress theme, and all I wanna know is like "What is it breaking? What bugs were fixed that might break my theme?" |
**Olivier Lacan:** Regressions. People are acting as if bug fixes are just this holy thing that never ever creates regressions on anything... But if I knew you fixed a bug in the language parses, and suddenly I update and the language parsing doesn't work for some thing, then I can tell "Oh... Okay, let me roll back. T... |
So again, you're lessening the frustration level and you're allowing people using your software who know it's open source - so they know it comes without a warranty basically, in a way - to self-diagnose more easily. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Release notes is a good word for it, too. I like the idea of the de facto being changelog... The changelog.md even, or just a plain old flat no extension changelog file in there; that's cool with me too, as long as that format stays the same, because that's I think what's been the way for so l... |
**Olivier Lacan:** Yeah. There's something that worries me with -- well, it doesn't really worry me... So GitHub released something called Releases, and that was about a year ago, I think; there's a blog post for it. And their idea was "Let's be smart" -- I think they were thinking really hard about how to improve that... |
\[44:11\] Not a lot of GUIs allow you to see those messages, which is kind of crappy... And I don't know if GitHub and other open source repositories allow you to see that. But you could basically put those entries - the Added, Removed, Deprecated stuff - in those Git tags... And that would be great, except nobody know... |
So they've added support for automatically pulling -- when you're trying to create a release on GitHub, it will actually tell you "What is the Git tag? Do you have a Git commit or a Git tag we could use?" and if you have a message on that Git commit or the Git tag, it will pull that and say "Do you wanna use that as yo... |
That's great, except that it's very rare that people actually -- it's even more rare that people keep up-to-date Git tags for every version they release than it is for them to even have a changelog in the first place... So it's a little like "Ugh, I wish people would--" It's asking even more than I'm even asking from o... |
**Break:** \[45:22\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think we might be kind of talking around this issue that you have on the project, "Why not use GitHub release notes?", and you've got a couple chimes in from GitHubbers - technoweenie, BeeKeepers... And I almost feel like GitHub muddied the waters, so to speak, by having this concept of releases. ... |
**Olivier Lacan:** It's true, but at the same time I've had conversations with them... So I don't generally work for GitHub, and I just have a few people I know that work for GitHub, and every time I talk to them, it's a really good conversation and I can tell they care. I can tell they're trying to do -- that contribu... |
\[47:57\] But I'm thinking maybe they have a point in the releases -- I think something that I've noticed GitHub doing is just trying to make Git more accessible, in general, for every possible way... And Releases is kind of saying, "Okay, you have tags, but tags don't really mean anything to most people." It's just li... |
A release is a tag that has a specific kind of meaning... Because you could have tags that just say "Experimental" or "Rails 4", or whatever; you have this little branch, and you tag that. That's not really a tag, actually. It's confusing. It's just a branch called that. |
But in this instance, I think you could see tags -- yeah, if you go to Releases on GitHub, you could see all the tags that a project has, and there's not a lot of metadata there, there's not a lot of context. They were basically trying to say "Okay, we know that Rails and jQuery and all these projects have tags in thei... |
So I guess they had a way to do that, and I think it's really interesting how they make it -- the flow of creating a new release as an open source maintainer... Just - okay, you pick a tag version, or you make a tag version, and you target a branch or a commit (a recent commit), you put a title on it... Which is kind o... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. And we already know naming is hard, so... |
**Olivier Lacan:** Right. So you're making it harder on them. But at the same time-- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it's more that overhead that prevents you from doing it in the first place. |
**Olivier Lacan:** Right. So this is why conventions are useful, because it means less thinking and more -- so what I like about their approach is the Git tag stuff. I think down the line if Git tools or Git itself makes it easier for -- but is more like a three-year vision than a "In six months I can fix this." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Olivier Lacan:** If they made it easier to manage and deal with tags, then it would be very simple for us to generate a changelog on the fly, based on the Git tags. That would be, to me, the best possible paradigm, because now instead of managing this file, you could have any service parse your Git tags and generate ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, the only time it would be lost is if someone downloaded like a bundle of your files, or something, without the Git hidden directory |
**Olivier Lacan:** Right. But let's say you could have a little generator with whatever your make tool is, to make your release - you could have it just actually dump an actual changelog file, and that'd be really cool. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We've gotta find a way... We've gotta find a way. And I'm glad you're on this mission, because you seem very passionate about it, plus - I don't think we got this in the show, but you're into linguistics, so you seem like you've got some passion around the right words to say in the right ways; that'... |
To close the show out, we always ask a couple cool questions, which we tend to get some neat answers to, so... We're hoping always that you deliver here as well. Jerod and I both, and the listeners are also wondering too, but who is your programming hero? |
**Olivier Lacan:** See, I've thought a lot about this question because you've sent me that a little earlier, and... I think it's not really so much programming as just the way to think of "What's the smallest thing I can do, that can have the greatest impact?" Right now, my hero is Aaron Swartz, just because through hi... |
You guys know, he sadly killed himself I think last year while he was being investigated by the FBI... And through basically just this sordid affair of just trying to release information that the public owns and should have access to... Research, basically. All the public research that is funded by the American governm... |
\[52:14\] Being French, it's weird for me to care about this, but there's even less care in France for that... So for me, people like him -- I don't want martyrs, I want people like him who just have passionately tried to make things right, and don't accept that because it's the way it is, then it should stay the way i... |
If there's a bad law, or Congress is trying to make the internet less good then, maybe you should do something about it, and you could start with a tiny little thing. If you help bolster the open source community by making an open source project that allows for people to see campaign contributions... Or I have a friend... |
People like that inspire me a lot. Beyond technical... It's just like, "Okay, so why are you doing this? What is your purpose?" Because your technical prowess is great... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's nice when you marry those two - the socially aware to the technically capable. |
**Olivier Lacan:** Right. |
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