Another replay that did not show up on list.
On 5/24/2013 9:00 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 10:24 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
would be great. And maybe it's finally time to bite the bullet and come up with some way to automatically generate Misc/NEWS from commit messages. No, commit messages do not a NEWS file make.
They often do. Nearly all of my NEWS messages are copy and paste from the commit message. This is often true of other people's commits. Anyway, my proposal, in response to Brett, is to make autocommit optional and possible partial bu only autocommitting the part of a commit message above a flag line like ***Library that identifies where to put the autocommit. This proposal does not conflict with separating the files.
The audiences are different (current and future developers vs interested end users), so it doesn't make sense to try to use the same content. Using commit messages also makes it annoyingly difficult to edit erroneous entries, It is impossible to correct commit messages now. Any error not noticed before copy and paste already gets put in NEWS. Errors in NEWS could still be corrected. Auto copy and paste does not change anything except the hell of lower context conflict.
as well as needing to come up with conventions to indicate commits which *shouldn't* get a log entry. My proposed default is no autocommit. If you do not want it for your commits, continue as present.
What *does* make sense is to use a directory structure (which version Since the conflict problem is entirely within the sections that would be put into separate files, I do not see how that affects the conflict problem at all. This seems to me like an orthogonal proposal.
Here is an alternate proposal. Each branch has a NewsLog file. Each entry consists of
TAG Entry
TAG is CORE, LIB, IDLE, TEST, or DOC. The three blank lines are part of the patch. Entries are put at the bottom of the file, so that the patch context is (should be) 3 blank lines above and <bottom of file> below. No conflict possible (unless differs subvert this by thinking the old blank lines are new and the new blank lines are old - maybe a commit hook could check and correct this).
When releases are tagged, NewsLog is emptied, the entries are sorted by tag and formatted ('- ' and ' ' prepended), subsection headers are added, and a corresponding section is added to NEWS.
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 The problem irritated enough other people that the devguide contains the suggestion to insert news items into a random place in the current list. This only works when the section contains at least a few entries.
Having missed previous discussions, my impression has been that old timers are so used to the current mess and experienced dealing with it that it was useless for me to even say anything. So if I do not care enough about an issue to suffer the commit pain, I leave it alone. Thanks Brett of saying something. However, I can only suggest as I have no idea how to implement a commit hook that would look at commit lines for a flag line to auto cut and commit. I do not even know if that is possible with hg.
Terry Jan Reedy