Follow Up To: Linden Lab's Obligation To Document ALL Changes In An Update

I am following this up as I posted originally on the 13th and Lawrence Linden said that he was 'Asking about this...' but have heard nothing further.

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It would be good if some definite policy could be stated on this so such situations can be avoided in the future. I have copied my original post from the above thread below:

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I've noticed a couple of changes to offline IM's that have, unfortuantely, broken my automated support avatar processing. The changes appear to be as follows:

1. The date has been placed before the avatar name.
2. The avatar name is no longer on a line on it's own and follows after the date and before the actual IM text.
3. Multiple IMs are coming through in a single offline IM email although I cannot pinpoint the time span being used to decide whether to group these together.

Point 3 is the most confusing one here as, because there was a lack of information in the release notes for this version, I am unsure if this is intentional or not - a good example of how not mentioning a change can lead to confusion as to whether it's a new bug or not.

Although this particular example is not a major issue, and is one that I can resolve now I know the new format, it does highlight something that has always been an issue with Linden Lab's release notes for updates - they are, invariably, far from complete.

Obviously nobody can expect Linden Lab to be aware of an individual's projects that a change might affect, in which case it would seem to be an obligation of Linden Lab to pre-warn via. release notes of every change that's being made, rather than producing such incomplete release notes. Then it's up to the developers to adjust accordingly, or be prepared to adjust when the release is live.

I'm not the first to be affected by an undocumented change happening, and I doubt I'll be the last, but as developers often have to be creative in their solutions to extract as much as they can from the tools provided, it would make sense if you helped them by producing more complete release notes, either as a separate, more technical version of the notes or included within a single complete release notes document.

I think many would thank you for it. I know I would

EDIT: Actually point 3 in my post above now means that the response time for my automated support avatar is really slow as IMs aren't being fired off immediately due to this new grouping of multiple messages into a single email

We did hear back some solid weight on this--let me check with Lawrence again to find out where we are at the latest; he has a great reasoning directly relating to what you said.