Advent of changelog: Day 24-25

Evening of Dec 24

That’s a Christmas evening already¹, so I focus on the final touches.

I copy the list of the latest versions of the “default” and “bundled” gems into a changelog (yes, the versions updated till the last evening before the release, and it is not even always some insignificant cosmetic last fixes.)

Updating library versions and inserting links to their repos make me think a few things. Like, the fact that many important libraries are extracted to their own repos and have their own release cycle greatly helps with maintenance burden of the main Ruby code; yet, it is very hard to observe what changed and whether it is significant. Some libraries make a lot of change between their versions associated with Ruby’s releases (like json), some kinda have a “version” yet nothing more serious in it than changing the CI settings or exposing the VERSION constant (like syslog). Some have CHANGES.md, some have History.rdoc, some use GitHub releases to describe changes (and then release notes are frequently auto-generate from the list of commits, mixing serious changes and small documentation adjustments), and some (like typeprof) have neither. Finally, the libraries size is different, and their frequency of usage in the community is different, so probably, providing meaningful change descriptions for csv is somewhat more valuable than doing so for something like tsort!

So, if (not today, but maybe in the upcoming year) I want to somehow broaden the scope of the Changelog² but stay reasonable on the effort necessary and size of the text… I need to somehow make choices of libraries and changes, and organize a process to gather it… Anyway, for now, I am just putting a few links associated with corresponding library versions to their changelog/release notes, when the library itself and the changes in it seems to be of interest (I don’t check every one of the 70 libraries, only those that I suspect to have some changes of general interest).

Next, some really final stuff:

• Replace the [Feature #19572] text fragments with a link to the issue (yeah… using SublimeText’s search-and-replace, like an animal! Every year I do promise myself that next year I’ll just auto-convert them, but as it is a thing that doesn’t bother until the last minute…);
• Fill the “Status” of the upcoming version;
• Check everything and fix some leftover typos;
• The rest should be done after the release itself, tomorrow…

..Ugh, save for unfinished business with Fiber#kill and Process.warmup. Which, honestly, I kinda give up on. The killing fibers across the threads ticket is still unanswered (so I don’t try to provide the code demonstrating that); and as for Process.warmup— for now, I leave the short description that I have. Maybe I’ll rethink it later.

Morning of Dec 25

Ruby 3.3 is released.

Unfortunately, docs.ruby-lang.org don’t have 3.3’s link yet, so I need to publish my changelog linking to master/ docs, and set a reminder to check in a couple of days and replace the links.

Commit: a4f5aa3

And just like that, we are online!

Ugh, except for the change that was merged in the night before Christmas (and not a tiny one), so I push an update to already published changelog right into master with commit: 95077d1.

And this concludes the “advent” of this year—save for a wrapping-up blog-post which I am planning to publish in a few days, to not over-saturate the internets with my content.

Honestly, I am not sure whether this diary was a fun reading. At least, it helped me to organize myself and observe how I do things—and I still hope that might be at least of some interest to others. And if not… Well, at least I hope the end result would be considered worthy of your attention.