Discussion About "What's New" documentation

[David T.]

I thought I would try to work on documentation bug 743672, in which I proposed moving the What’s New portion of the Overview chapter of the guide to a separate appendix. 

Setting aside the intricacies of this proposal itself (it affects several existing files, and adds a new file entirely), I have some questions to pose to the developers.

First: is there a point to having anything in the documentation about what’s new in the first place? It seems to me (as I noted in the bug) that a new user is likely to have recently downloaded the program, and is unlikely to need to know what is new. Moreover, it would seem to me that a list of “What’s New” is more appropriate as a dynamic online resource, which will by nature be up to date with, well, what’s new. Given the overhead that is inherent in GnuCash’s documentation process this section is likely to repeatedly get out of date in the Guide. It would seem to me that it might be better to eliminate What’s New altogether, or replace it with a general referral and link to an online listing of What’s New.

If the developers still see the need for the What’s new section, I would still think it useful to link to such a list, but I was unable to identify a single place online that lists what actually is new. I dug around a while on gnucash.org, on the wiki, and on SourceForge without seeing something that obviously lists What’s New for a given release. The closest I got was the News section on the main page of gnucash.org. It would seem to me that including a link to such a resource would be more appropriate than pointing to the release schedule (which is what the Guide links to in the What’s New section). 

Related to this: I think it would be good be to re-design the website and take the News panel from the main page and put it on its own page, with a separate menu link to it. This could then be the repository for all news (such as What’s New in a release), and the docs could be modified to direct all user queries for news to this location.

As always, I welcome guidance.

David