[Python-Dev] What's New editing

[R. David Murray]

On Mon, 06 Jul 2015 21:45:01 +0300, Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 05.07.15 20:52, R. David Murray wrote:
> > Just so people aren't caught unawares, it is very unlikely that I will have
> > time to be the final editor on "What's New for 3.5" they way I was for 3.3 and
> > 3.4.  I've tried to encourage people to keep What's New up to date, but
> > *someone* should make a final editing pass.  Ideally they'd do at least the
> > research Serhiy did last year on checking that there's a mention for all of the
> > versionadded and versionchanged 3.5's in the docs.  Even better would be to
> > review the NEWS and/or commit history...but *that* is a really big job these
> > days....
> 
> Many thanks you David for your invaluable work.
> 
> Here is 3.5 NEWS file cleaned from duplicates in 3.4 NEWS file (i.e. 
> from entries about merged bug fixes). It is much less than unfiltered 
> NEWS file. Hope this will help volunteers.

That's great.  What I did was work from the html-rendered NEWS page, and
click through to the issue to figure out whether it was a bug fix or an
enhancement.  Not having to do that check should speed things up.  I
seem to recall I did find a couple of things that were screwed up and
still bore mentioning in whatsnew, but I doubt that is likely enough to
make enough difference to be worth it.  I also wound up fixing some
incorrect NEWS entries (wrong numbers, English, other errors), but that
is not central to the whatsnew project.  That activity was probably
included in the hours count, though.

For David (or whoever):  in addition to the obvious task of writing up
appropriate entries in What's New, part of what I did was to make sure
that all of the relevant documentation entries had the appropriate
versionchanged or versionadded tags, and that the new documentation made
sense.  As I recall, my working rhythm was to write the What's New entry
including links to the things that had changed, render the what's new
page to html, fix the links, then work through the links to make sure
the docs made sense and there were appropriate 'versionxxx' tags.  You,
of course, may find a different working style more beneficial :).

Oh, and work from newest change to oldest change.  I did it from oldest
to newest and only realized late in the game that was the wrong order,
because some changes got undone or modified by later changes :)

--David