(A bit of context) Upon the publication of Announcing Rust 1.65.0, I got interested in the release process of the release announcement because I thought maybe we in the future need translations of these announcements as well. So, I looked up the internal forum and also the repo that hosts the contents of the announcements.
However, I didn't find much clarity, transparency, accessibility and standardization in the process of releasing Rust Release Announcements. I found the announcement of Rust Release Team and I found Rust Forge links (the latest is this) to some details of this process in its replies. But the Release team announcement and the Rust Forge documentation do not say much about how, where and when a release announcement should be composed and edited.
The related Rust Forge documentation says some principles about the release notes, though.
Only pull requests that impact stable users of Rust should be included. Generally, more exciting items go toward the top of sections. Most items are simply links to the PR that landed them; some that need more explanation have additional, unlinked text; anything supported by an RFC has an additional RFC link. Reuse the PR titles or write descriptions as needed for clarity.
But I think the release notes are different from the release announcements.
Perhaps as a consequence, the PRs and commits, which edit the contents of a Rust Release Announcement, are not very clear, standardized and informative. Take the PR for Announcing Rust 1.65.0 as an example, we community members cannot see any editorial exchanges and their reasoning from the PR and its commits. This is not transparent nor welcoming to the community. And the other PRs for Rust Release Announcements also have this issue, which you can check from the commits and PRs yourselves in the blog repo.
Besides, the PRs for Rust Release Announcements are not standardized yet. For example, their titles/names are not standardized, which makes us difficult to search for the PR of a particular Rust Release Announcement. This also hinders new community members to contribute editorial contents.
So, what can we do to address these issues? I think:
- We can do some basic standardization first. For example
- the PRs for Rust Release Announcements should have a standardized title, say "Announcing Rust 1.xx.x"
- Define the timeline for releasing a Rust Release Announcement
- Move the conversations about editing a Rust Release Announcement to GitHub comments in the PR of this Rust Release Announcement
- Attribute the editorial contribution by adding a link to the PR of a Rust Release Announcement in the end of that announcement.
But why are the above issues important and noteworthy? From my point of view:
- Editorial/documentation contribution matters as well. We should thank these contributor as well. Allowing more clarity and transparency can help figure up contribution from each contributor.
- These issues hinders contributions
- (from the context at the beginning) I'd like to propose to translate these Rust Release Announcements into various languages (and contribute of course). When translational subtleties happen, we need to discuss and come to consensus. Resolving the above issues helps keep conversations publicly understandable and trackable.
If I left anything, just let me know. Thanks.