Re: [python-committers] what's going on with Misc/NEWS?

On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 1:29 AM, Gregory P. Smith <greg@krypto.org> wrote:

...

I like where you're heading with this but it still leaves merges during Spruits and when a few people are working at once by putting stuff in a single file.

I don't know if sprints happen often enough to make them a big worry, but it's true they are there.

...

Per news item / per issue files for each release that are riled up into the actual news file by a release manager run script & commit at release time make more sense.

That's heading back to where I started, when people dismissed the idea as too complex. It's a pretty straightforward change to my previous suggestion though. Instead of having these layouts:

NEWS.next/
    3.3.txt
    3.3-only.txt

NEWS.next/
    3.3.txt
    3.4.txt

You instead have layouts like:

NEWS.next/
    3.3/
        core/
            issue123456.txt # Core change with issue number
            misc.txt # Core changes without issue numbers
        library/
            issue54321.txt # Library change with issue number
            misc.txt # Library changes without issue numbers
        ...
   3.3-only/
        ...

NEWS.next/
    3.3/
        ...
    3.4/
        ...

Whether categorisation is done by file prefix or by directories doesn't make much difference, although I have a slight preference for separate folders since repeating prefixes feels like irrelevant noise.

Directory if this happens.

The NEWS update script could even use the revision history to decide which order to add entries to the bulleted list.

I think the annoyance with this approach is you will have to remember to add a file every time you do anything worthy of NEWS. Without something like hg newsworthy to take an optional issue # and then have you enter your NEWS entry and then use that to pre-populate the commit message, people will forget. Now granted adding the commit later is not a huge deal, but it is something that might happen if you forget to hg st before committing.

And if you go that route you start to end up with something like a marker to separate in the commit message what is meant for the commit and what is meant for NEWS.