After far too long, here is the first cut of the public change log for 2.6!
<http://www.freeciv.org/wiki/NEWS-2.6.0>
Please say if there's something missing, or inaccurate, or I've not
correctly guessed the intent behind some change, or you don't remember
it being like I've said.
This was the main thing blocking 2.6.0-beta1 (believe it or not). I hope
to release beta1 within the next few weeks; it's long overdue.
The main thing I want to sort out first is to let rulesets settle as
much as possible, but even there the sorts of changes under
consideration generally don't break savegames, so we could go without
all of them. See the currently targeted tickets at
<https://www.hostedredmine.com/projects/freeciv/roadmap#2.6.0-beta1>
I don't intend to have a string freeze for beta1, and I expect a fair
number of strings will change after beta1.
Hopefully, since S2_6 has been stable for so long, we won't need too
many betas/RCs? As part of gathering the NEWS, I've tried out most of
the features. But there are still some rough edges on new features to be
polished (e.g., zoom and music), so I expect to need at least a beta2.
------
This release and changelog represents over 4 years' work
in >5300 commits and >4800 tickets. Thanks for all that work.
It took a while to sift through it all and make sense of it, though.
I'm going to have to do it all again for S3_0 (starting with Jan 2015,
so already 33 months behind). I could use some help.
One thing that I think would help a lot is for big sub-projects
consisting of many patches to be tied together with some sort of words.
In some cases I've had to reverse engineer why a facility was added or
where a patch series was going. Having metatickets, or a wiki page or
something, with some description of the high-level goals, motivation,
and design and (ideally) updated with what the net result was at the end
would speed things up, I think.
Even small projects benefit from good rationale in tickets and/or commit
messages.
<https://tartarus.org/jacob/junk/freeciv/2.6/S2_6-relnote.html> is a
working document that cazfi started and I embellished an an intermediate
step to group the changes into themes before digesting it for the NEWS;
if you can make that easier it would be a great help.
(I plan to reuse some of this slightly over-the-top tooling and data for
S3_0.)
Thanks for maintaining
<http://www.freeciv.org/wiki/Lua_reference_manual>
<http://www.freeciv.org/wiki/Template:UpdateNavbox>
These seemed to stay pretty accurate.
