How do you use the maintenance release notes/MRNotes/Relnotes?

InterSystems has always provided -- with each maintenance release -- a document that describes all the changes in that maintenance release. This document is known informally as the relnotes or (now) the MRNotes*. Here’s a link to one of them, just to make sure we’re on the same page: https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20211/csp/docbook/relnotes/index.html

Could you please comment here and tell us if you use this document and how you use it and what you use it for?

*We're trying to avoid confusion with the Release Notes, which are the descriptions of the new features of the release -- quite a different kind of content!

Craig Regester · Apr 28, 2022

For maintenance releases, we use the document you linked to for a few key purposes:

Are there any items reflected that we're impacted by potentially, even if unknowingly? (i.e. something causing a data integrity issue or unclean data in Interoperability msg)
Are there any items that brought to light features/capabilities we may not have even know but ultimately decided to go after because of the release notes?
If yes to either of the above...
- Are there any fixes that will require extensive retesting of our integrations in PROD/TEST(STAGE)?
  - If so, does that outweigh the benefits of bullets 1 and 2 and thus wait for a major EM release?

For example, I recently upgraded our IRIS for Health 2021.1 instances to 2021.1.2 to take advantage of the (enhanced) debugging in VS Code IDE after determining the other items wouldn't 'break' anything else we were doing and/or happy with... while also seeing a few other issues we've noted but were not show stoppers for us were also addressed!

So yes, very much like the format and in fact, would love to see MORE like this for the EM releases. (i.e., 2021.1.0) as some of us nerdy folks like to see the low-level changes/updates. :-)

Thanks for all you do!

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