On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:39 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.
Agreed.
For me, in the best case scenario hg takes care of the merge; in the worst, kdiff3 pops up and I have to press CTRL and 3, 2, s, q (to include the two conflicting news, save and quit respectively). Solving the merge conflict is not something that really bothers me, and even when hg merge screws up, doing a revert and copying the news entry manually is not really cumbersome (and it doesn't happen really often anyway).
I understand that some people don't use and/or they are not sure how to use merge tools, but spending 10 minutes to install kdiff3 (or similar tools) and learn how to use it is a good investment IMHO*.
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.
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).
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 :-)
This is somewhere on my TODO list but even though hacking on Mercurial is a lot of fun, its priority is quite low since this "issue" doesn't affect me. I'm also not entirely sure what people want -- having separate files for every major version and an extension that merges the news entry in the right file should also be doable.
And do we really need a merged NEWS file at that granularity?
Not really, IMO.
I'm +0 on having a separate file for 3.3, 3.4, etc., as long as I don't have to copy/paste the news entry in the right file every time. Anything more than that is just going to cause more troubles.
Best Regards, Ezio Melotti
As I side note, before committing I always do an "hg diff" to check that everything is OK. Misc/NEWS is usually the last file in the diff, so I just copy the first sentence of the entry and use it in the commit message.
- this is also valid with Mercurial in general, but there's no need I tell you this ;)