[darcs-users] Bits from the RM

[Petr Rockai]

Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> writes:
> On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 23:13:33 +0100, Petr Rockai wrote:
>> so there's a fair amount of work that went into 2.2, and it would be great to
>> have it documented in a user-digestible way. Unfortunately, I know zilch about
>> how our changelog is made (or whether that work is already done, or almost
>> done).
>
> The ChangeLog is now hand-written.  In the darcs-news repository
>   http://code.haskell.org/darcs/darcs-news
> (darcs-news is dormant until we can find a new editor, sorry folks!)
Thanks for the info. What I have usually done on other projects (mostly
one-person stuff) is, after tagging a release, going through darcs changes
--from-tag <previous-release> and writing up a changelog from there. I
acknowledge that with darcs, this is a little more tedious, since the number of
patches is much higher.

I suppose here it would help to have the "short (secure) version identifiers"
(with secure being strictly optional here) thingy that Zooko has been asking
for like forever.

But, as an alternative, I propose that if someone picks up the weekly news,
they, with every issue, tag the darcs repository with news-YYYY-MM-DD, whoever
ends up writing the final changelog can:

$ darcs changes --from-tag=<prev-release> --tag news
<rip out the interesting bits from those news entries>

$ darcs changes --from-tag=news
which ideally would contain very few changes

Ideally, news-n would ideally cover everything since news-(n-1) for this to
work usefully.

> Eventually, it would be good to update
>  http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/MaintainerTips
> with your experiences.

It also wants to be updated wrt. maintainer/release-manager split and
such. I'll look at it when I have some idle time.

Yours,
   Petr.

-- 
Peter Rockai | me()mornfall!net | prockai()redhat!com
 http://blog.mornfall.net | http://web.mornfall.net

"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
 indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
     -- Blair P. Houghton on the subject of C program indentation