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Release notes are meant for the entire edX community, but are most frequently used by partner course teams and Open edX users. MIT ODL in particular reviews the release notes in weekly release audit meetings.  Release notes are organized first by date and are cumulative, with the most recent date first(For more information about the way MIT ODL uses release notes, see MIT's Release Notes Use Cases).

In addition to posting the release notes at docs.edx.org, the documentation team publishes a portal announcement that abridges the release notes. The portal announcement is available on the partner and Open edX portals, and is also sent via e-mail to portal subscribers.

Content

Release notes are organized first by date, with the most recent date first. They are also organized by product.

For each release, the document has sections for the different edX products affected. Typically a section for an edX product (Studio, LMS, Insights, Open edX) contains information about new features or enhancements, issues with workarounds, and fixed bugs.

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The doc team also publishes release announcements for each release on that summarize the release notes on the edX partner portal and Open edX portal. The announcement is made approximately two hours after the platform release. This time lag helps assure that a retraction is not needed in cases when the release must be reverted.The portals automatically send an email when the announcement is published (though the email may not arrive until several hours later).

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Changes made to other repos, including the edx-analytics-dashboard (Insights), the mobile apps, IDAs, and ORA2, are released on other schedules. Those changes are included in the next release notes, which might therefore follow the software release by a week or even more.A portal announcement that summarizes the release notes, with email notification to subscribers, is made approximately two hours after the platform release. This time lag helps assure that a retraction is not needed in cases when the release must be reverted.

Update Documentation 

The process for creating or updating the release notes is outlined on the 1. Writing Release Notes page.

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Release notes use the edX wiki, Sublime (or another text editor), GitHub, and ReadTheDocs. For more information, see 1. Writing Release Notes.

The release portal announcement uses the partner and Open edX portals. For more information, see 3. Publishing the Release Portal Announcement.

Open edX Releases

For Open edX releases beginning with Dogwood, the Open Source team is responsible for identifying all of the additions and changes to document in the release notes. This effort includes asking engineers to identify features and updates that have an impact on the next named release on a wiki page, and going through release notes written for edX platform releases since the last named release to identify what to include. This work for named releases can also uncover changes that have not yet been documented. 

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