In what tense should the changelog be written?
When one writes one's "blurb" for the changelog, in what tense should it be? I mostly see entries in present tense: bpo-43660: Fix crash that happens when replacing sys.stderr with a callable that can remove the object while an exception is being printed. Patch by Pablo Galindo. bpo-41561: Add workaround for Ubuntu’s custom OpenSSL security level policy. But occasionally I see entries in past tense: bpo-26053: Fixed bug where the pdb interactive run command echoed the args from the shell command line, even if those have been overridden at the pdb prompt. bpo-40630: Added tracemalloc.reset_peak() to set the peak size of traced memory blocks to the current size, to measure the peak of specific pieces of code. I couldn't find any guidance in the Python Dev Guide after sixty seconds of poking around. Obviously this isn't a big deal. But it might be nice to try and nudge everybody in the same direction. It'd be pleasant if the changelog read in a more unified voice, and using the same tense and sentence structure would help towards that goal. If we arrived at a firm decision, maybe "blurb" et al could add a little text suggesting the proper style. Cheers, //arry/
participants (14)
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Antoine Pitrou
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Barry Warsaw
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David Mertz
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Ethan Furman
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Greg Ewing
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Guido van Rossum
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Jeff Allen
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Larry Hastings
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nchristopherfox@gmail.com
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Oleg Broytman
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Serhiy Storchaka
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Steven D'Aprano
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Victor Stinner
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Wes Turner