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

[Terry Reedy]

On 5/24/2013 8:24 AM, Brett Cannon wrote:
> I was trying to do a simple merge of a doc change between 3.3 and
> default and the usual Misc/NEWS conflict came up.
I have had things like this happen and after pain iwth kdiff3 just 
edited the default version
>   But when I looked at
> the diff it was massive! Turns out that Misc/NEWS in default goes from
> 3.3.1rc1 to 3.4.0a1
> (http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/24ffb0148729/Misc/NEWS) while
> Misc/NEWS in 3.3 goes properly through all versions between 3.3.1rc1
> to 3.3.3rc1 (http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/3c4a5dc29417/Misc/NEWS).
I do not know if I had the same cause. Never looked that far.
> I have to get to work so I don't have time to fix this, but if someone
> does have the time to unwind this mix-up that has accumulated that
> would be great. And maybe it's finally time to bite the bullet and
> come up with some way to automatically generate Misc/NEWS from commit
> messages.

+100 on ending or ameliorating NEWS conflict hell. I do fewer commits 
because of it.

Proposal: If the commit message has a line like
***Library
then everything *above that line is put into NEWS. This makes automatic 
generation optional and optionally allows additional non-NEWS extras.

The immediate problem is conflict with the lower context, the three 
lines below
Library
---------
<blank>

which is often different between 3.3 and 3.4 and possibly changed anyway 
since the patch
was made. Can hg be told to ignore the lower context and just match the 
3 upper context lines for this file?

The larger problem is that our workplace design subverts the premise of 
non-checkout repositories, that people usually work on different areas 
of files, making conflicts rare. Our current design makes conflict normal.

--
Terry Jan Reedy