[darcs-users] darcs patch: Hard-code darcs-2.1.0 ChangeLog entries. (and 2 more)

[David Roundy]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 8:39 PM, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck at gmail.com> wrote:
> Currently AIUI this is auto-generated by blacklisting all the changes
> that aren't directly visible to users, and just printing anything that's
> left.  This is useful because it means that you can't accidentally leave
> a user-visible change unmentioned in NEWS, but the downside is that its
> a lot of work to maintain the blacklist.
>
> Now, the way *I* would approach this problem would be to make a NEWS
> file that's a list of bullet points.  Just before each stable release
> (or pre-release), the release manager goes through all the patches since
> the last release, and manually writes a new section for the NEWS file.
> A final release would replace the preceding pre-release sections.
>
> To me, the big advantage of this approach is that a human author can
> easily categorize changes, making the file more useful to end users.
> Here's a mockup of what it might look like for the 2.0.2 to 2.1.0 entry.
> I haven't bothered to write the full section, just the first few.

No, the make_changelog approach does involve a human author rewriting
all the change messages, because comments from darcs are rarely useful
as changelog entries.  The make_changelog just associated each bullet
point with a particular patch, so that we could (in principle) write
and edit the changelog entries independently from making releases, and
the release would then automatically include the appropriate changelog
entries.  The problem is that the tool was written to distribute the
effort of writing changelog entries, but the effort didn't end up
getting distributed.  The bit about announcing all the patches that
haven't been commented on was a late addition by Eric, in the hopes of
motivating other contributors to help write changelog entries.

David