Re: Emacs 28.2 released

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

I think I see where the miscommunication is coming from here.  Let 
me explain my suggestion more clearly:

Stefan's announcement mail was for 28.2, and has this sentence:

"Emacs 28.2 is a bug-fix release, with no new features with 
respect to Emacs 28.1."

That's probably why his email didn't have any link out to a 
description of the release -- because 28.2 has no new features; 
it's just bugfixes.

(You can see his mail here, for reference: 
https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2022-09/msg00730.html)

What I'm saying is that *every* release announcement email should 
have a clickable link to the release notes for that release, even 
when we're only making a bugfix release.

There are a couple of reasons for this, one direct and one more 
subtle:

The direct reason is:

Many readers will want to be able to click on a link to see what's 
in the release, because even if it's only bugfixes, they'll want 
to know what those fixes were.  They're making a decision about 
whether to upgrade, and typically that decision involves reading 
the release notes.  So if we just point to the release notes for 
*every* release, always, we'll help smooth their decision process.

The more subtle reason is:

Some people who (for whatever reason) didn't upgrade from >= 27.x 
when 28.1 came out may decide to do so when they see the 28.2 
announcement.  Online release notes are usually structured so that 
if one is reading the notes for X.Y, it's very easy to get from 
there to the notes for X.(Y-1) -- you just scroll farther down in 
the web page, or you edit the URL in some obvious way, or 
something like that.  Thus, people who saw Stefan's announcement 
would have the following assumption in the back of their minds: 
"If I can get to the release notes for 28.2, it'll be an equally 
easy hop from there to the release notes for 28.1".  Therefore, 
including a link to the 28.2 release notes in the 28.2 
announcement email would help those who are upgrading from >= 27.x 
too, as well as those upgrading from 28.1.

So my suggestion is that release announcement emails always 
include a direct link to the release notes for that release, for 
the reasons given above.  And specifically, that we stick to this 
policy even for minor or bugfix releases.

I hope this clarifies.

Best regards,
-Karl