Bug 154568

Summary: Add a section "experimental features" in the Release Notes
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: Jean-Baptiste Faure <jbfaure>
Component: DocumentationAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: NEW ---    
Severity: normal CC: olivier.hallot, raal, stephane.guillou
Priority: medium    
Version: 3.3.0 release   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature: Regression By:

Description Jean-Baptiste Faure 2023-04-02 15:15:43 UTC 
Description:
When enabling experimental features, you do not know which features you have enabled. To fix that, the release notes of each version could have a section dedicated to list all experimental features available in this version. LibreOffice UI should provide a link to this webpage.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Menu Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Advanced
2. Check "Enable experimental features (may be unstable)"
3.

Actual Results:
You do not know what you enabled.

Expected Results:
You are aware of each experimental feature you enabled.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No

Additional Info:
The information is available in the release notes of the used LO version.
A link to this webpage is available in the label of the checkbox.
Comment 1 Stéphane Guillou (stragu) 2023-04-04 06:53:35 UTC 
I agree this is a needed addition.

The documentation for the Advanced panel does not attempt to list experimental features: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/optionen/java.html

The banner used for (documented) experimental features is this one: https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/optionen/experimental.html

By searching which pages embed this banner, one can find some of the experimental features: https://opengrok.libreoffice.org/search?project=help&full=+%27embed+href%3D%22text%2Fshared%2Foptionen%2Fexperimental.xhp%23experimental%22%27&defs=&refs=&path=&hist=&type=&xrd=&nn=1&si=full&si=full

The release notes is the perfect place to list such experimental features, as they will very much depend on the release, and it would be good to attract attention to them for contributors willing to test them.

Some release notes pages did have that section, see for example: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.2#Experimental_Features

And in the past, some new features were flagged as experimental in the release notes, see for example: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.0#Accessibility_improvements

In my opinion, we should follow these guidelines:
- In the body, list features that are not experimental anymore, but available by default
- Have a separate section that lists _all_ experimental features for this version, to keep track of them.

Thoughts?