I was working on Xelog and had an idea. A change log describes what has changed in anapplication. It lists new features and bug fixes. But I don't think it's really about logging project changes. Its main audience is users and they want to know how new updates affect their experience with the program. Most of them don't really care about changes deep inside the application, only about things that are visible on the outside. A user doesn't really care about things like code refactoring (and he shouldn't), unless he's using this code directly. He only cares the benefits it provides, for example refactored code can lead to improved performance (and this can be important if performance hindered program's use).

Many, many projects only talk about changes to the project, but don't really talk about what it means to the user. Often it's possible figure that out, but what user thinks in many cases is quite different from what developer thinks. This can lead to unintended confusion.

I added support to Xelog to document this aspect of the changes. Each entry in the change log needs to have an impact flag to indicate how much a user is affected by the change. It can be something minor, such as a spelling fix, or something that can break things, such as public interface change, document format change and so on.

In addition to the notes describing the change and impact flag, there's a new text field to allow developer describe how the new update affects the user. Its purpose is to allow developer explain what effect he thinks the change will have. It's a good place to describe how to adapt to the new data format or how to use new feature to its fullest.

I've updated old views to display impact information for each change. In addition, I'm going to add views focused at showing change log with emphasis on this user impact. I want to help anybody reading the change log to understand which changes are important and provide new, cool functionality, and which are minor and thus can be ignored.