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What's the best source of emacs release notes - especially for reading prior to installing an update?

I searched Google for "emacs release notes". There are some posts about specific releases (and some, like this about Emacs 25.1, are really good), but no definitive source.

There's another question on this site which discusses what's new in Emacs 25. The answers and comments there point to some source locations - are those generalizable?

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Doug Harris
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The Emacs NEWS file is the "history of user-visible changes."

The NEWS file on the emacs master git branch shows the latest in development http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/etc/NEWS. As of this writing, it shows features planned for Emacs 26.1

If you need release notes for an earlier version, browse the etc directory for files like NEWS.25, NEWS.24, etc.

Alternately, browse starting at the top of the repository, click on one branch (e.g. emacs-25 and navigate to etc/NEWS to see the news of that branch.

Doug Harris
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    You can open the NEWS file from Emacs with `C-h n`. – Tyler Feb 03 '17 at 18:12
  • Ah, good hint - but doesn't help with reading release notes prior to download and installing. – Doug Harris Feb 03 '17 at 18:13
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    You can use the [GitHub Emacs mirror](https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/tree/master/etc) to browse `NEWS` files, or download them individually and read them in Emacs using `outline-mode`/`org-mode`. – Tianxiang Xiong Feb 03 '17 at 19:28
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    Also mentioned in [an answer to the linked question](http://emacs.stackexchange.com/a/7187/5296): http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news – npostavs Feb 03 '17 at 20:19