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

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Fri May 24 21:26:29 CEST 2013

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 2:27 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Le vendredi 24 mai 2013 à 14:23 -0400, Brett Cannon a écrit :

> 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; hg rev -r Misc/NEWS

I'll add that to the devguide if it works for me next time.

> * 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). Then Misc/NEWS* become harder to read for third parties, since reading Misc/NEWS-3.4 won't tell you everything that happened in 3.4.

This is when we could have a script that just pulled from both 3.3 and 3.4 NEWS files and makes a single one.

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. Do you mean Mics/NEWS doc typos?

No I mean typos in the docs. For instance, I found a missing parenthesis in the docs for some module, but backporting it is enough of a pain that I don't want to bother. The only reason I did this one for sys is because it clarified semantics.

> 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? Sure, it would be. Like Nick said: if you are motivated enough to write the extension... :-)

We'll see.

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