I don't feel qualified to describe these details other than what I'm currently doing, which is to simply give a link to the TC/RC ticket. If it's deemed necessary to do more than that, then I'd prefer that someone else do the announcements.

I should add that although it's good for the announcements to have lots of information, it's also important for them to be quick (since people can start the download immediately, and ask questions later). For this reason, I'd recommend trying to stick as closely as possible to copy and paste, to reduce the delay.

in any case, I just noticed, I already updated the SOP for this:

https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=QA/SOP_Release_Validation_Test_Event&diff=262277&oldid=246786

So, I see the current announce template has a link to the trac ticket, but it doesn't say anything about the trac ticket. It just dumps the link in there.

Perhaps a simple thing to do would just be to add some text there which says 'for a record of the changes from the previous candidate, see the trac ticket: (link)' or something like that.

The 16 Final RC5 announce is at

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test-announce/2011-November/000337.html

In the first paragraph, it says "Changes are listed in the rel-eng
ticket below.", then below it has the subject line and link to the ticket:

Create Fedora 16 Final release candidate (RC) - live and traditional
https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/4967

I could modify the sentence in the first paragraph to something like "For more detailed information (including changes from the previous candidate), see the rel-eng ticket link below." If possible I'd like to keep the rel-eng link together with the other ones rather than moving it to the top.

I think the adjustments we've made here cover the intent well enough; let's close it.

To me it looks like nothing has really changed. :(

If I look at the [http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test-announce/2012-May/000440.html F17 TC3 announcement], I still don't know which bugs are fixed and have to search a [https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/5163 ticket] that deals with '''all''' the TCs and has 24 comments.

AFAIK, at the time of the TC/RC release, the only information about the content is what's in the ticket (and the requested changes for the latest compose are always at the end, obviously). To learn more (for certain, as opposed to speculating) requires actual testing, and that won't happen until people get the announcement, which I've always tried to send out immediately after the TC/RC ticket is closed. Adam is certainly more qualified to put together the kind of overview you want, but he may or may not be around to send the announcement that quickly. In any case he can make a follow-up post, which he's done a number of times.

Would it be possible to copy & paste the relevant updates to the announce mail? I think you as the sender have a much better insight of the changes than the people who receive the mail, especially if they don't look immediately after the mail was sent and the ticket has changes in the meantime.

The main problem with this are the changelog themselves which more often than not do not contain this information to give you an example from our update testing report.

pidgin-sipe-1.13.2-1.fc17 (FEDORA-2012-9233)
Pidgin protocol plugin to connect to MS Office Communicator

Update Information:

New upstream release: minor bugfixes

ChangeLog:

• Sun Jun 10 2012 Stefan Becker chemobejk@gmail.com - 1.13.2-1
• update to 1.13.2: bug fix release

This does not tell us anything absolutely nata.

There are no links to the upstream/downstream reports that got fixed in this release.

In anycase the most sensible way is to modify the same script that we have that generates the update reports for consistency in the information flow, switch the security header with relevant announcement and or bugs it allegedly fixed. Then run against those components that are on relevant media.

Replying to [comment:8 cwickert]:

Would it be possible to copy & paste the relevant updates to the announce mail? I think you as the sender have a much better insight of the changes than the people who receive the mail, especially if they don't look immediately after the mail was sent and the ticket has changes in the meantime.

My understanding of the changes, compared to Adam, is extremely limited. I could just copy and paste the relevant comments from the ticket as you suggest, but that would then make it harder for people to find the other information in the ticket, and possibly generate more tickets by people asking that their information be copied and pasted into the announcement, and so on. I'd really prefer to stick as much as possible to links rather than direct copy and paste, to avoid an arms race, and also because it's less error-prone and faster.

Regarding the suggestion by johannbg, even if this information can be automatically generated, I'd still resist copying and pasting directly into the announcement, for the above reasons, but adding a link to it would be good.

We could provide links an construct the email something like this.

Some auto generic Announcement .
...

The following Fedora Release candidate updates need testing:
( links as suggested )
​https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-6268/mactel-boot-0.9-4.fc17
​https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-6092/grub-0.97-91.fc17
Etc...

Details about builds on this release candidate:
( Changelog )
.....

Who's the author of the updates-testing report?

It would be good to get some feed back from him at this point

Replying to [comment:9 johannbg]:

The main problem with this are the changelog themselves which more often than not do not contain this information to give you an example from our update testing report.

This is a general problem that has nothing to do with this ticket in particular.

Update Information:

New upstream release: minor bugfixes

Bad example: We are talking about the part of the development cycle where we are already frozen, there shouldn't be any new upstream versions any more, only bugfixes, so it should be trivial to link to the bug reports.

What I am interested in is, which packages were new (with link to bodhi if possible) and what bugs they address. That's all.

andre: would it be difficult for you to simply copy/paste the information from the comment in the trac ticket into the announcement mail?

johann, can you please not confuse this ticket with discussion of update descriptions? I'm sure you have a valid concern there, but it's not part of the subject of this ticket.

It's not a question of difficulty - it's easy to do, what I'm concerned about is that it will make it more difficult for people to find other information in the announcement. A link takes up a fixed amount of space, so if everything is a link, then a specific link will always be two-thirds of the way through the announcement, say, and it's easy to find. Once I start replacing links with copied/pasted content, that's no longer true. I'm worried that we'll start seeing other tickets asking for their info to be copied and pasted in, since the existing copied/pasted content makes their links hard to find. Eventually the announcement may get so long that someone will submit a ticket asking for most of this content to be replaced by links again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Of course, I could put a direct link to the first comment in the TC/RC ticket referring to the specific compose, for example https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/5196#comment:8 for 17 Final RC4, rather than just a link to the ticket as a whole.

If there are no objections, I plan to use direct links as described in comment 15 for each TCn/RCn for n > 1. For TC1/RC1 I can only link to the ticket itself.

Roger. Perhaps for F18 we can simply use a single ticket for each release, I'm not sure the TC/RC ticket split really achieves anything. We used to have separate tickets for the DVD and live composes, that didn't achieve much either and we've had no problem combining them, so let's try for one more simplification...

so we did that, and the announcement mails link to the tickets now. Also, 'relval nightly --if-needed' (which is what the bot uses) provides the information on which of the 'significant packages' it tracks changed since the last nominated nightly, if any. I could maybe make it do the same for TC/RCs, but haven't really looked at that yet.

Still, I think we can say this ticket is pretty much addressed.