When I receive a notice that a new version of a plugin that is not part of the standard moodle package is available, my first instinct is to ask what has changed, to assess the urgency of deployment and perhaps to decide if I even want to install that new version. And yet, I see no easy way of getting a high level view of that information. Am I missing something, or shouldn't every release of every plugin include release notes? Why should the user have to go to a developer's bug/enhancement tracking tool to find any of these details?
For all my plugins I keep a full history in the readme file. This can be seen when you click on 'Learn more' for the release on the downloads page, for example: https://moodle.org/plugins/pluginversions.php?plugin=format_topcoll and https://moodle.org/plugins/pluginversion.php?id=9827.
Your release notes, Gareth, are a model for the genre. I posted this question because one of the plugins I use was updated 4 times during the past month, which started to annoy me, and there was no easily accessible description of what was happening. Others put a link into the "learn more" doc, which is OK if it links to a summary of changes, rather than a technical log in a bug tracking tool. It would be nice if there were some standard for all plugins accessible via moodle.org.
I agree that it should be easy to find out what has changed. As a developer I find it satisfying to summarise the fixes and new features. For my gapfill question type plugin each new release includes a new line in readme.txt that summarises the changes.
I also include and a new file called releasenotesxx with a detailed description. So I was working on releasenotes19.txt the other night which will be the features in version 1.9. I'm not sure that having an entire new file for each release is quite such a good idea and I may consolidate the detailed descriptions into a single file at some point in the future.
shouldn't every release of every plugin include release notes?
It should indeed. And the Plugins directory has inbuilt support for it - see e.g. https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Plugin_files#CHANGES But we (HQ) do not have resources to review and approve individual plugin updates once the plugin is approved. So currently there is no way to force plugin developers to do these things.
There is a way though. We all in the Moodle users community can encourage the plugins maintainer to provide useful release notes (among other meta-data). So let me suggest - if you realize some plugin is updated without meaningful and useful release notes, go ahead and report it as a bug in their issues tracker.