[rfc] NEWS handling

[Robert Collins]

On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 09:28 -0500, John Arbash Meinel wrote:


> So in my mind, something like "BRANCH_NEWS" would work here, right? So
> each branch could have its own versioned news entry, and then at submit
> time PQM would take that value and push it into the overall NEWS file.
> Or perhaps a DEVEL_NEWS/ directory, and any new entries in there will
> get brought in?
> 
> (The advantage of a directory with custom named files is less chance to
> accidentally conflict at merge time.)
> 
> I certainly like the idea. We've talked about variants of it before.

I'd like to be able to just say 
'section foo, content blaaaaarh', N times, and have pqm DTRT.

so yes, perhaps BRANCH_NEWS,which is always empty in trunk (so no
conflicts as long as the LCA is trunk.) looms would tend to fool this
though, unless we also arrange a special 'deletes do not conflict' merge
algorithm for it.

So a directory with a per-branch file is probably better. I think I'd
like a little plugin for this one, 'pqm add-news IMPROVEMENTS
"``DirState.update_entry`` no longer calculates or returns file sha1 if
the sha1 is unlikely to be needed by status."

But perhaps there are better options still for getting the new data into
pqm.


Anyhow, there are two key steps:
 - get the entries to pqm
 - insert them into NEWS.

The latter step anyone interested in helping out can do right away -
given a dict {section:entry_as_one_line}, add it to the first matching
section in NEWS, breaking on whitespace only (don't break foo.bar), 78(I
think) max column with.

-Rob

-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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