[issue18967] Find a less conflict prone approach to Misc/NEWS

[Zachary Ware]

Zachary Ware added the comment:

R. David Murray wrote:
> I want no script asking me questions.  Post-facto errors for omissions are
> fine (and if I have to positively say no in the input file, that's fine).
> tkinter is right out.

I have been planning a command line interface, something along the lines of
`news.py --issue 12345 --section Core --message "Converted ham to spam"`.  Of
course, there would be short options as well.  The interactive interface was
just what I wrote first because it seemed easiest at the time :).  Adding the
command line part shouldn't be too hard with argparse, though; I'll see if I
can do it this afternoon.
 
> If you *also* want to make a script that asks questions (or even a tkinter
> ap), that's fine, but it should not be the main interface, it should be a
> wrapper.

I'm fine with that.

> One thing I really don't like about the separate file approach is that you
> lose the obvious chronology.  It's probably not a blocker, but it is
> definitely a disadvantage.

If we give the .news files names of the form "nnn-issuexxxxx.news" where 'nnn'
is the number of .news files that already exist in the target folder (or the
whole tree) and "-issuexxxxx" is only present if an issue number was given,
chronology would be kept, though it might get a bit hairy merging between
branches.  It would be unlikely to have actual merge conflicts (unless your
news entry wasn't linked to an issue), but might cause things to get a bit out
of order.

Assuming a satisfactory interface to give news.py the proper information and a
good resolution to the chronology issue, how do you feel about the rest of the approach?

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue18967>
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