This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org: --- Title : Lets talk about changelogs, or, how I loathe 'bugfixes and performance improvements' Author : Remy van Elst Date : 02-01-2021 URL : https://raymii.org/s/blog/Rant_Lets_talk_about_changelogs.html Format : Markdown/HTML --- ### Bugfixes & performance improvements This is a short personal rant to start the new year off. When you're a multi billion dollar company with more software developers than you'd ever need, how on earth is it possible that your public changelog in an app store is just `bugfixes and performance improvements`? ![bugfixes and performance improvements][3] > Everything in the above screenshot translates to 'bugfixes & performance improvements' If that is all you're going to put there, then just leave it blank. Or be honest and put `We can't be arsed to fill this in` there. For me as a technical user it's not actionable, and your non technical users are not going to read that page anyway. You're using version control and a bugtracker and have one or more people with the job title 'social media manager' or 'developer advocate', put those together and you can probably come up with more than `bugfixes` and/or `performance improvements`. I bet you have an internal changelog anyway. Just put a small (or large) list with a few lines of what changes in there. Please.

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I expect nothing less then bugfixes and performance improvements each update, otherwise, why update at all? I'm one of those people that [disables auto updates][6], manually goes through the changelog and based on that, decide if I want to update now or in the future. [Not all change is progress][5], but please, please tell me what changed. ### What I'd like to see You don't have to be all [jetbrainsy][2], although, for me that would be best. Just an [overview for a major update][1] and a few lines for a minor update are good enough. Here are a few examples on the app store that have a few lines of text, it can be that simple: ![better changelog][4] You see? Not that hard right? So please, for your technical users, make this year one where we get less `bugfixes and performance improvements` and more actual changelogs! [1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210102050356/https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/whatsnew/ [2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210102050500/https://confluence.jetbrains.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=203292766 [3]: /s/inc/img/changelog1.png [4]: /s/inc/img/changelog2.png [5]: https://luddites.latenightlinux.com/ [6]: /s/blog/Ubuntu_Snap_auto_updates_broke_my_development_setup.html --- License: All the text on this website is free as in freedom unless stated otherwise. This means you can use it in any way you want, you can copy it, change it the way you like and republish it, as long as you release the (modified) content under the same license to give others the same freedoms you've got and place my name and a link to this site with the article as source. This site uses Google Analytics for statistics and Google Adwords for advertisements. You are tracked and Google knows everything about you. Use an adblocker like ublock-origin if you don't want it. All the code on this website is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 license unless already licensed under a license which does not allows this form of licensing or if another license is stated on that page / in that software: This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see . Just to be clear, the information on this website is for meant for educational purposes and you use it at your own risk. I do not take responsibility if you screw something up. Use common sense, do not 'rm -rf /' as root for example. If you have any questions then do not hesitate to contact me. See https://raymii.org/s/static/About.html for details.