[pypy-dev] Documenting merged branches

[Antonio Cuni]

Hi all,

the most laborious part of doing a new release is writing the "What's new"
document.  Together with Armin and Maciek, we tried to find a way to make it
easier and less time consuming.

The idea is that whenever someone merges a branch to default, he should also
briefly document what it does by writing a couple of lines in
doc/whatsnew-1.9.rst.

I also added a test (doc/test/test_whatsnew.py) which checks that all the
merged branches are mentioned in the document. To document a branch, you have
to include a special rst comment ".. branch: BRANCH-NAME" which is recognized
by the test.

If the branch is uninteresting for the what's new document, one can just add
the comment somewhere in the doc without writing anything.

At the moment the test is passing because I added empty docs for all the
branches merged so far. It would be nice if everyone could have a look at it
and document the branches he merged.

ciao,
Anto