Discussion About "What's New" documentation

[Geert Janssens]

On Saturday 27 February 2016 10:06:13 John Ralls wrote:
> > On Feb 27, 2016, at 9:56 AM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> I'm in favor of removing What's New. We cover that more timely in the
> release announcements. In the docs it's bound to be obsolete most of
> the time.
> 
+1 from me.

Geert