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Updating the Release Notes

This page has some tips on figuring out what's changed between two releases. I've used this technique to update the What's New page in the extensions doc, but the technique is more generally useful.

To see what's changed between two releases (e.g. M9 and M10):

  1. Go to https://omahaproxy.appspot.com/viewer, and get the current versions of the two releases. E.g.:
    1. M9 (win stable): 9.0.597.107
    2. M10 (win beta): 10.0.648.119
  2. Go to https://omahaproxy.appspot.com/changelog, enter the versions in the fields, and click Get SVN logs. E.g.:
    1. Old Version: 9.0.597.107
    2. New Version: 10.0.648.119
    3. <click!> You'll see a big page of revisions, with a revision range (e.g. 67679:72316).
    4. Search for interesting strings in this page, and open relevant links to check whether they're worth talking about. Note: This tells you the differences between these branches at the time the branches were created. If you substitute 1 for the last tuple of each version #, you get exactly the same information.
  3. Do #2 again, but this time change the old version to be the same as the new version, but with a 1 as the last tuple. E.g.:
    1. Old Version: 10.0.648.1
    2. New Version: 10.0.648.119
    3. <click!> You'll see another page of revisions with a different (higher) revision range (e.g. 72323:75907).
    4. Search for interesting strings in this page.
  4. Once you have a list of probable changes, make sure they weren't merged into the previous release. One way to do this is to do #3 again, using the previous release's numbers. E.g.:
    1. Old Version: 9.0.597.1
    2. New Version: 9.0.597.107
    3. <click!>
    4. Search for the revision #s you found interesting in steps 2 & 3. If you find something that was backported, make sure it's in the release notes for the old release (if it's worthy).

The most useful strings strings to search for (for extensions/apps release notes):

I used to also/instead search for these:

Don't bother searching for "api".