This is a proof-of-concept proposal for discussion of possibly rendering the Rust release notes as an mdbook to be deployed somewhere on doc.rust-lang.org and/or included with Rust releases for local viewing. Maybe.
View the rendered release notes mdbook. Note that it is currently being updated by hand, so may not be current with what is in the rust-lang/rust repository.
The canonical source for Rust release notes is https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/RELEASES.md, one big, long Markdown file that is difficult to navigate and sometimes even difficult for GitHub to render completely. The only way to search it is with find-in-page.
There is a rendered HTML page of the release notes, but it is also one large hard-to-navigate page, and doesn't have dark mode. I'm also not sure if that's linked to from anywhere; I don't see it on https://www.rust-lang.org/learn (which is where doc.rust-lang.org redirects to) and I only found it by looking for release-notes related stuff in the rust-lang/rust repo.
A Rust script (a prototype of which is in this repo) that reads the existing RELEASES.md and writes out mdbook files with one minor release per chapter.
- No need for the release team to change anything about the current release notes process
- Easier to navigate to a particular release
- mdbook provides better search than find-in-page
- mdbook provides dark mode
- mdbooks are already used in Rust documentation
- Yet Another Thing to maintain
- Bikeshed the way the mdbook is implemented, such as how much metadata about a release should be displayed in the sidebar
- Integrate the script and mdbook into rust-lang/rust's current mdbook processes