Prepare for v5.3

[aplaice]

Draft release here (for those who can see it):

https://github.com/anki-geo/ultimate-geography/releases/tag/untagged-4b4f9704df7a82dcf491

I'm planning to release v5.3 on GitHub in a week (next Sunday (13/04) (?)).

I don't think there are any open issues or anything else that needs to be included in v5.3, but if anybody strongly believes that there's something that absolutely must be, please do comment here or in the relevant issue thread!

This release is the first since the creation of the interactive deck. Its experimental status is unfortunately still unchanged, but I think it very much should be included in the release (as an additional set of decks). In terms of version numbers I think it should share the v5.3 number (rather than have its own versioning (cf. v0.0 here). The decks will be named Ultimate_Geography_v5.3_${LANG}_EXPERIMENTAL.zip (maybe it should be _EXPERIMENTAL_INTERACTIVE for explicitness?).

[aplaice]

Interactive deck experimentation

Actually, some things that I would have liked for the interactive deck is including @axelboc's ~logarithmic zoom as an option and also a facility for setting custom highlight patterns (probably very hackily), so that people can experiment with various colours/patterns. (I've been thinking about implementing the latter for a while, but it's been on the back burner...)

Description why this is impractical

Otherwise the v5.3 release will be essentially the same as v0.0 and while getting the interactive deck out to a larger number of people will still be valuable in terms of gauging user interest and potentially attracting more contributors, it'd also be a loss of an opportunity for more extensive experimentation among users (what works best/what looks best etc.).

OTOH I also don't want to either delay the release much longer or try to push out something in the last minute (because there's a risk that I'd break something).

Probably the best option is to release everything as-is and ask people who are interested in the interactive deck to subscribe to an appropriate (not yet created) overarching discussion thread.



(To be clear, what IMO we'd most like (in descending order of preference) is:

1. People to push the implementation forward technically
2. People to experiment with various options (like zoom settings or highlight patterns) (but to enable this we would need some technical changes, first)
3. People to say whether it's something they like, conceptually (but we already know that it's something we'd like to develop further)
4. People to test the current implementation (we already generally know what's currently not quite ready)

(with a sharp drop between 1 and 2 and between 2 and 3. (for anybody reading this — this is very much not to say that general feedback is not highly valued! just that 1 and 2 are even more valuable)).

Releasing as-is still allows 1, 3 and 4, but I'd expect it'd be much easier to find people interested in and capable of 2, than 1.
)

[aplaice]

Draft release finally drafted:

https://github.com/anki-geo/ultimate-geography/releases/tag/untagged-4b4f9704df7a82dcf491

(It's extremely annoying that neither the read nor even triage roles in GH organisations can view draft releases :( .)

[axelboc]

Awesome, thanks a lot for doing this! 😍

There's no track changes or commenting feature, so I thought I'd give you my feedback here for clarity and posterity (please don't take this as criticism; I think you've done a great job already and I will not be pedantic about any of it at all; my goal is more to share my thought process when writing release notes):

• The experimental deck is brand new, so I'd suggest rephrasing: New Interactive Map for Experimental Deck => New Experimental Deck with Interactive Map
• Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) translation => add country code for reference so people know which ZIP file to download? See Danish translation in v5.2.
• Very minor: within each section, I try to order the changes by importance ("features" i.e. changes in content first, then "bug fixes" i.e. typos, better wording, punctuation/capitalization, etc.), and then by scope (changes that apply to all languages first, then to a few languages, then to a single language).
• When a change was made over multiple PRs, I keep it as a single bullet point and just list all the PR numbers at the end. I'm thinking in particular of the bullet points "[ZH-TW] Implement experimental/interactive deck recipe" and "Interactive map improved compatibility for Anki v24.06+", which can both just be hidden within the very first interactive deck change, since it was made as part of the same release.
• In the Country names, capitals and supplementary info section, I'd recommend being a bit more explicit about the actual content changes when possible, so people don't have to hunt for them in the PRs. I like to bold the most relevant word (e.g. the new spelling, or the name of the geographical entity concerned by the change). For typos and other "bug fixes", I'd avoid mentioning the CSV files and word things up in a more user-friendly way (e.g. in v5.2: "[NL] Fix multiple country and capital names and fix/improve various country/capital info").
• In the Other changes section, again, I'd maybe rephrase some of the bullet points to be more useful to end users, like what's been improved in the documentation and in what way does the BrainBrew update bring benefit to this repo. Generally speaking, release notes don't have to be 100% exhaustive -- if an internal change is of no interest to existing users/contributors, I wouldn't bother listing it.

[aplaice]

Thanks very much for the feedback! It's very much appreciated and I agree that all your points help improve the notes for users!

I think that I've implemented the changes where they made sense (e.g. excluding all the alternative names of the Sea of Galilee, as it'd be too long).

Maybe we should add these points as a none-prescriptive section of CONTRIBUTING.md?

[axelboc]

Perfect, all the changes are now very clear. I've made a few more tiny stylistic changes (colons instead of parens, a bit more bold here and there, a couple of links to the docs, etc.) and I think it's good to go!

[axelboc]

FYI, I'm working on a new section for the CONTRIBUTING guide.