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

[Ezio Melotti]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:39 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.
>

Agreed.

For me, in the best case scenario hg takes care of the merge; in the
worst, kdiff3 pops up and I have to press CTRL and 3, 2, s, q (to
include the two conflicting news, save and quit respectively).
Solving the merge conflict is not something that really bothers me,
and even when hg merge screws up, doing a revert and copying the news
entry manually is not really cumbersome (and it doesn't happen really
often anyway).

I understand that some people don't use and/or they are not sure how
to use merge tools, but spending 10 minutes to install kdiff3 (or
similar tools) and learn how to use it is a good investment IMHO*.

>> 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.
>
> * 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).
>
> 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 :-)
>

This is somewhere on my TODO list but even though hacking on Mercurial
is a lot of fun, its priority is quite low since this "issue" doesn't
affect me.  I'm also not entirely sure what people want -- having
separate files for every major version and an extension that merges
the news entry in the right file should also be doable.

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

I'm +0 on having a separate file for 3.3, 3.4, etc., as long as I
don't have to copy/paste the news entry in the right file every time.
Anything more than that is just going to cause more troubles.

Best Regards,
Ezio Melotti

As I side note, before committing I always do an "hg diff" to check
that everything is OK.  Misc/NEWS is usually the last file in the
diff, so I just copy the first sentence of the entry and use it in the
commit message.

* this is also valid with Mercurial in general, but there's no need I
tell you this ;)