[PATCH] D123957: Update the developer policy to mention release notes

[Aaron Ballman via Phabricator via llvm-commits]

aaron.ballman created this revision.
aaron.ballman added a reviewer: lattner.
Herald added a project: All.
aaron.ballman requested review of this revision.
Herald added a project: LLVM.

As a project, Clang has gotten negative public feedback about our lack of communicating changes to users. There are comments on places like Hacker News or Reddit where users have (rightfully) been confused as to what changes happen in a given release, leading to misinformation like Clang not adding support for C++20 features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28761464.

This documents the expectation that changes which impact users should have release notes, and it's normal for code reviewers to ask an author to add a release note for a given change.

This addresses: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/54965


Repository:
  rG LLVM Github Monorepo

https://reviews.llvm.org/D123957

Files:
  llvm/docs/DeveloperPolicy.rst


Index: llvm/docs/DeveloperPolicy.rst
===================================================================
--- llvm/docs/DeveloperPolicy.rst
+++ llvm/docs/DeveloperPolicy.rst
@@ -180,6 +180,25 @@
 for coverage (correctness, performance, etc) testing, not feature or regression
 testing.
 
+Release Notes
+-------------
+
+Many projects in LLVM communicate important changes to users through release
+notes, typically found in ``docs/ReleaseNotes.rst`` for the project. Changes to
+a project that are user-facing or users may wish to know about should be added
+to the project's release notes. Examples of changes that would typically
+warrant adding a release note (this list is not exhaustive):
+
+* Adding, removing, or modifying command line options.
+* Adding or removing a diagnostic.
+* Adding or removing an optimization.
+* Modifying a C stable API.
+* Notifying users about a potentially disruptive change expected to be made in
+  a future release, such as removal of a deprecated feature.
+
+Code reviewers are encouraged to request a release note if they think one is
+warranted when performing a code review.
+
 Quality
 -------
 


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