Well, unless I'm missing something, the only place to get the complete changelog would be checking the svn logs unless you want to check every single nightly thread. It's not very convenient if you're just a modder who doesn't care about the internals of the engine and doesn't want to sift through dozens of log entries per week to see if there's something in there you should take note of.
It would be very handy if there was a separate log/thread/whatever which would contain a list of all changes which modders need to know about (that is, those which break compatibility in some way, such as the +frequency->+period change). Could be as simple as links to the relevant svn revisions.
In fact. we have one of those threads already,
3.6.13 ChangeLog. Notice how neglected it is. To be honest, SCP has a hard enough time making sure that all of the coders update the wiki for things that they change or add so that there is documentation of the features, let alone yet another place for us to sometimes put things (because you don't want to know about internals of the engine).
Chief just posted the link to the SVN change log, which I think he should include in the template for all nightlies going forward so that those that don't catch every nightly post can still find out what is going on.
Actually, that's exactly what I do. I got in the habit of reading the changelog every time a new nightly is posted. I do this even if I don't download the nightly. Really, there's not that many nightly releases that should make it difficult. Just start now and keep it up. Make it part of your forum reading routine.
I will concede that the changelog often doesn't contain enough information about some things. But that's easily changed by simply asking any commits to try and be a little more clear. I have seen some that say things like "This breaks parsing, reverting" which leave my wondering what is "this".
But I don't need the coders need to be responsible for yet another thread and sifting through which changes are important enough to go in it. I'd rather the coders spend their time coding. Besides, I know there are some coders that forget to even put their features on the Wiki. Should they add another spot for them to remember to change?
In the end, it's not my decision anyway.
EDIT: Actually reading over the thread again.. it seems people were originally upset about the change that was made and it got turned into a discussion about communication. I can't help but notice that the issue was discovered because of a "communication" thread... To me, it really seems like this can be a civil discussion about keeping the old parsing or not rather than this generic discussion about communication between coders and modders.
Indeed, there is only one "nightly" a day posted (sometimes we get Linux or OSX ones as well, but they just rehash the contents of the Windows posts).
Yes, some of the commit messages can be rather useless but most of the time that is because what ever they are changing is actually that unimportant. However, the best way to fix the useless commit messages is to just bug the coder that committed them to elaborate on the change (not another coder that happens to be online, because that will not change the offenders behaviour).
RE: this thread. HLP, we know drama! It seems to me that the original problem was that I didn't announce to the world (in advance) that I was breaking parsing. I suppose the extension to that is that the commit message doesn't explicitly call out that the parsing breaks, which I will keep in mind the next time that I make a break change. I have already posted my reasoning for the change and I still stand by that reasoning. As I noted in the explanation, if I broke a released MOD I will put the legacy parsing in, however, as others have already noted, SCP does not guarantee compatibility between
releases never mind between the random shards that are the nightly builds.