This section focuses on the traditional why, what, how questions.
Why?
It appears that many projects suffer from a steady release notes, because this is something tedious to do, and very often
thought as something optional. According to me, this is quite the opposite: if you want to be able to trace back the modification
of your project, the release notes is the right place for that. XRN enables you to store the history of your release notes.
What is it about?
The idea of this little framework is to propose a tool that enables to write release notes for your components whatever they
are: end-user applications, developing tools. The release notes are addressed to both end-users (knowing nothing particular
about the developing world), and the software developers.
How?
Because XML is a nice structuring medium and more and more universal, I decided to build the solution on the XML format. The
benefits are:
an XSD (the successor of DTD) will help you to understand the structure of the release notes, which are described in the XML
format,
it is easy to transform the XML release notes in whatever other textual format, among which HTML is a master choice (universal,
just requirs a browser).
Do you need it?
If you are working on a project that delivers packages, it is always better to propose a release notes with the package. If
this release notes is kind of a mess, then this little framework will help you to produce clean release notes. If you are
in this case, then you may be intersting by the current tool!