[Python-Dev] generated NEWS files

[Guido van Rossum]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 5:59 PM, Benjamin Peterson
<musiccomposition at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 7:55 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>  > In the past we haven't done that because often the change logs are
>  >  either too chatty (they do administrative stuff that doesn't deserve a
>  >  NEWS entry) or they are too brief (in the heat of the battle
>  >  developers don't always write great changelog entries). While it's
>  >  easy to fix NEWS its not easy to fix changelog entries (only a few svn
>  >  super-users can do it, and it's a pain).

>  A NEWs entry wouldn't be added if the special **NEWS** marking wasn't
>  present. I think we'd have to come up with some way to let people
>  change/edit by overriding those in the commit messages, but I'm not
>  sure how that would be done.

It would be fine if that was *one* way of adding a NEWS entry, but I
don't think it should be the only way, and I don't think it would work
well to regenerate the NEWS file from those entries. In practice we
see corrections on NEWS entries all the time.

Also, there's the issue of which section of the NEWS file an entry
should be added. That's often subjective.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)