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

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