On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
Brett wrote:
Of course, we've talked about doing something like this before, it's just never irritated anyone enough for them to sit down and *write* the associated NEWS file generator, or the code to split the existing NEWS file for the active branches :)
I think that's overly complicated.
Agreed. I'm not surprised Twisted uses something like that :-), but we don't need that level of complexity.
I don't see why we need anything more than simply NEWS/3.4, NEWS/3.3, etc. and just split the files per feature release since that's the interest (and merge) boundary.
You'll have to copy stuff by hand, though, if you don't want to rely on the merge machinery. So we have two possible file layouts:
- (current) a single Misc/NEWS is merged from branch to branch. Pro: hg merge copies the text for you. Con: hg merge sometimes screws up and you have to clean up a large conflict.
But hg won't let you simply revert; at least today it said I had to either resolve the conflict or do an update -C which tosses the whole change which is just annoying.
- a dedicated Misc/NEWS-x.y per major version. Pro: no merge conflicts ever. Con: you have to copy the message by hand when merging a bug fix to the upper branch. Con: it's easy to forget to copy the message (hg won't yell if you don't do it), so people *will* forget (and it's annoying grunt work for those who notice it).
So the question becomes do we really need to copy every entry? Beyond simply being redundant, it's annoying when doing merges because of the constant conflicts. I would argue that in bugfix releases we could say in the issue whether it stops there or propagates into the next feature release (e.g. [regression] or [bugfix]). Then it becomes habit to always specify that (and maybe even have a Mercurial extension that detects when neither is specified and throws a fit).
Either way the status quo makes me not want to fix small doc typos like a missing parenthesis since this is enough of a hassle to not make it worth it.
The major con with the current scheme *might* be solved by a dedicated hg extension, but someone needs to have enough free time and passion to try and write it :-)
Wouldn't an extension that does the copying be easier than resolving the conflict?
-Brett
And do we really need a merged NEWS file at that granularity?
Not really, IMO.
Regards
Antoine.
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