[issue18967] Find a less conflict prone approach to Misc/NEWS

[Terry J. Reedy]

Terry J. Reedy added the comment:

A sequential log of commit messages for a particular branch would give one an even better snapshot view of activity since not all commits have news messages and even when they do, commit messages sometimes have additional info. But see below.

The essence of my proposal is that the ORIGINAL entry of a news item by a human be into the tracker where there is no conflict and where it can be seen by people looking at the issue. Eliminating that conflict is the subject of this issue. After that, items can be mechanically copied wherever desired, including, possibly, into a file in the repository. My apology if this part was not clear enough.

Such mechanical copying and  re-arranging should not have the conflicts that are the subject of this issue. In particular, if the gating system is the only entity that edits particular news files (and I propose that there could be more than one), it will not have conflicts with other editors. 

Since these would be secondary, derived files, I don't see why any or all should be in the hg repository, as opposed to being part of the doc package available online along with other derived files. In other words, the hg repository is for original master files used to create derivative files nearly always not kept in the repository. We do not put .html files derived from master .rst files into the repository. So I do not see why files derived from hg repository commit messages and the tracker sql repository should go into the hg repository either. But I don't especially care if they are.

I doubt Guido favors a system that inhibits commits by making them unnecessariy painful and troublesome.

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue18967>
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