[python-committers] what's going on with Misc/NEWS? (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri May 24 20:03:42 CEST 2013

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

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

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