>KeePass is a free open source project.

Can you state your point more explicitly? That fact seems unrelated to my question.

> The way you present it, with "good" vs. "bad", suggests that you're arguing for one, not for both, for release announcements instead of release notes.

I don't think release notes are bad, but I think adopting a release notes style for a release announcement is bad. Similarly, I think adopting a commit message style in release notes is bad.

I'll look for ways to clarify this in the article.

>> When vendors just publish a terse changelog, it feels like they don't care much about me

>That depends on what you mean by terse. "Bug fixes and performance improvements" is terse and careless. A comprehensive list of changes is not necessarily terse. And in a sense, "release announcements include only the most impactful changes" is terse too.

When I say "terse" I mean that they describe each individual change tersely. KeePass is an example of a vendor I think publishes release announcements with terse change rundowns, and I think the announcements suffer because of it.[0, 1] When minor changes get the same screen real estate as big new features, it's hard for the reader to recognize the important features because the signal to noise is too high.

Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of KeePass release announcements?

[0] https://keepass.info/news/n250304_2.58.html

[1] https://keepass.info/news/n240601_2.57.html

Thanks for reading and for the kind words!

I know a lot of the comments are critical, but I find the feedback helpful, and I've already made some improvements to the article based on the comments here. In some cases, I think there's pure disagreement, where some commenters feel that anything other than a dev-oriented changelog is "selling out" to marketing. Some of the feedback is misunderstanding what I'm advocating (e.g., some readers perceived the post as advocating release announcements instead of changelogs). But in the end, my audience for this post is developers, so it's helpful to hear candid reactions from developers, even though I know HN commenters aren't perfectly representative of developers in general.

Thanks for reading, Jeff!

>> In contrast to release notes, which aim to be exhaustive, release announcements include only the most impactful changes.

>No, don't do this. Provide release notes, not release "announcements". Exhaustive is good; exhaustive is helpful to the reader. Let them know their "little" bug is fixed. Or maybe if you accidentally introduced a new bug with your change, or affected the user's workflow in some way, the reader can figure that out too.

They're not mutually exclusive. You can publish both release notes and a release announcement.

>You don't have to sell your software to someone who is already using it. That's just annoying.

I really disagree. I'm guessing you mean "sell" as in "manipulate" but I see it as "get users excited."

Of the software products I use and pay for, I appreciate it so much more when the vendor takes time to write a release announcement with care and focus on user needs. When I receive release announcements from Tailscale or Fly.io, I don't think, "Oh, boy, they're just trying to sell me something." I think it's cool that they're putting in the effort to showcase their work.

When vendors just publish a terse changelog, it feels like they don't care much about me and couldn't be bothered to present their work to me in a more accessible way.

>Just a small title change would help a lot: "Create events 10x faster with new Duplicate button"

Thanks, that's a great suggestion! I've just updated the example.