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

[Brett Cannon]

On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 1:29 AM, Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org> wrote:
>> I like where you're heading with this but it still leaves merges during
>> Spruits and when a few people are working at once by putting stuff in a
>> single file.

I don't know if sprints happen often enough to make them a big worry,
but it's true they are there.

>>
>> Per news item / per issue files for each release that are riled up into the
>> actual news file by a release manager run script & commit at release time
>> make more sense.
>
> That's heading back to where I started, when people dismissed the idea
> as too complex. It's a pretty straightforward change to my previous
> suggestion though. Instead of having these layouts:
>
>     NEWS.next/
>         3.3.txt
>         3.3-only.txt
>
>     NEWS.next/
>         3.3.txt
>         3.4.txt
>
> You instead have layouts like:
>
>     NEWS.next/
>         3.3/
>             core/
>                 issue123456.txt # Core change with issue number
>                 misc.txt # Core changes without issue numbers
>             library/
>                 issue54321.txt # Library change with issue number
>                 misc.txt # Library changes without issue numbers
>             ...
>        3.3-only/
>             ...
>
>     NEWS.next/
>         3.3/
>             ...
>         3.4/
>             ...
>
> Whether categorisation is done by file prefix or by directories
> doesn't make much difference, although I have a slight preference for
> separate folders since repeating prefixes feels like irrelevant noise.

Directory if this happens.

>
> The NEWS update script could even use the revision history to decide
> which order to add entries to the bulleted list.

I think the annoyance with this approach is you will have to remember
to add a file every time you do anything worthy of NEWS. Without
something like ``hg newsworthy`` to take an optional issue # and then
have you enter your NEWS entry and then use that to pre-populate the
commit message, people will forget. Now granted adding the commit
later is not a huge deal, but it is something that might happen if you
forget to ``hg st`` before committing.

And if you go that route you start to end up with something like a
marker to separate in the commit message what is meant for the commit
and what is meant for NEWS.