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

[Brett Cannon]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at 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.
>
>> 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.

But hg won't let you simply revert; at least today it said I had to
either resolve the conflict or do an update -C which tosses the whole
change which is just annoying.

>
> * 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).

So the question becomes do we really need to copy every entry? Beyond
simply being redundant, it's annoying when doing merges because of the
constant conflicts. I would argue that in bugfix releases we could say
in the issue whether it stops there or propagates into the next
feature release (e.g. [regression] or [bugfix]). Then it becomes habit
to always specify that (and maybe even have a Mercurial extension that
detects when neither is specified and throws a fit).

Either way the status quo makes me not want to fix small doc typos
like a missing parenthesis since this is enough of a hassle to not
make it worth 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 :-)

Wouldn't an extension that does the copying be easier than resolving
the conflict?

-Brett

>
>> And do
>> we really need a merged NEWS file at that granularity?
>
> Not really, IMO.
>
> Regards
>
> Antoine.
>
>
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