[python-committers] A possible solution to the Misc/NEWS merging problem

[R. David Murray]

On Tue, 11 Aug 2015 14:58:45 +1200, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> On 11 August 2015 at 10:38, Brett Cannon <bcannon at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We have all been there: you fix something in some maintenance branch, do
> > your `hg pull` into the default branch, and everything but Misc/NEWS merges
> > cleanly. You typically revert Misc/NEWS, commit your forward-ported change
> > to default, and then move on with your life. It would be much easier if
> > Misc/NEWS was never an issue.
> ...
> > The whole point of this email is to let everyone know that this is the plan
> > and should be coming in a couple of months (I'm also hoping to make a
> > decision about a new overall workflow by 2016, but I need to hear back from
> > Donald first about whether the proposed timeline for a test instance will
> > work for him). If you hate this idea so much that it will cause you to stop
> > contributing to Python then let me know, otherwise I'm going to assume
> > people are either happy with this approach or will begrudgingly accept it.
> 
> Clearly I should join the core-workflow list.
> 
> Has anyone put forward the 'standard' solution other projects use: to
> extract NEWS entries from commit logs?

Yes, and we will doubtless allow for the tracker field to be populated
from specially tagged commit message paragraphs.  But the commit log is
*not* the NEWS file, and commit log entries cannot be edited, so the
source for the NEWS file has to be somewhere else...thus the tracker
fields.

Note that IMO it should never be the case that a commit log entry is the
*same* as a NEWS entry: the two serve different purposes and have
different audiences.  The full commit message should be wordier.  But
allowing committers to put a tagged paragraph in a commit message so they
don't have to also update the tracker is a fine idea.

--David