Hi guys,
I like Discourse a lot and I appreciate having such awesome Open Source software available for free (ignoring the cost of hosting it myself). So I hope you guys don't think that I'm bashing the great work you're doing with this post.
But I think there are some improvements which could be made to help users. Some of them are quite tedious and possibly annoying for developers but are quite useful for Discourse users.
I'll make separate topics for each of the improvements I'm thinking of, this is the first one.
Discourse has a helpful message telling you that the instance is out of date and recommending to the latest version. There is an even more helpful link pointing to the changelog. And this is where things get blurry, since the link is always https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commits/master. Which is fine, since you can see the changes.
However... that's the full list of changes. So you have to scroll quite a bit to find the things you want (such as: first commit included in v1.5.0.beta10, last commit included in v1.5.0.beta10). The commit messages format is not standardized and is also quite hard to parse at a glance.
I recommend adding some sort of tags at the start of the message, with a limited set of tags available: fix, improvement, doc, release, etc.
And a format which makes the tag stand one. Some examples I've seen and used in the past:
- FIX - ... IMPROVEMENT - ... DOC - ... RELEASE - ...
- [FIX] ... [IMPROVEMENT] ... [DOC] ... [RELEASE] ...
- FIX: ... IMPROVEMENT: ... DOC: ... RELEASE: ...
Extra style points awarded if bugfixes point to issue tracker IDs ([FIX-182323] - ...) or if the changelog is automatically transformed into a human readable version such as this one: https://www.jfrog.com/jira/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10070&version=15683
Thank you for bearing with me