Re: NEWS entries -- user-visible?

[Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net>]

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> Greets,
>
> It seems that some of the NEWS entries that are currently there for the
> 1.9.0 release reflect awesomeness, but not awesomeness which users can
> react to.
>
> Specifically, I am going to remove the following NEWS entries, which are
> great stuff but thankfully invisible to the user:
>
>     ** Guile now uses Gnulib as a portability aid
>
>     ** Primitive procedures (aka. "subrs") are now stored in double cells
>     This removes the subr table and simplifies the code.
>
>     ** Primitive procedures with more than 3 arguments (aka. "gsubrs") are
>     no longer implemented using the "compiled closure" mechanism.  This
>     simplifies code and reduces both the storage and run-time overhead.
>
> Let me know any feedback you might have. I'll be working on compiling a
> more comprehensive NEWS tonight and in the coming days.

Hi Andy,

Well, my first reaction was that we would lose something by removing
these.  But on reflection I think you're right.  These entries are
only meaningful to Guile-internal developers (i.e. people developing
Guile itself), and are similar in information content to commit
messages, only at a slightly higher level.  An active developer would
be following the mailing list and git repository, and so couldn't
learn anything new from these.

Also it's a good discipline to make sure that all of our NEWS is
meaningful to users (including application developers, of course), and
leaving in items like these would tend to obscure that overall
picture.

Therefore I'm happy with removing them.

Regards,
        Neil