[rfc] news layout tweak

[Eric Siegerman]

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 17:18 -0400, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Instead, how about the release notes for an RC simply be the (draft)
> release notes for the non-RC release they lead up to.

Please, no.

I'm an end user who only runs final releases, but who *does* read
(i.e. mostly lurk on) the mailing list.  And even though I rarely
run RCs, I eagerly read their release notes, for a concise
summary of what nifty improvements to look forward to in the
upcoming final release.

So even though it's not of practical importance to me which
change happened in which RC, I find it most helpful for NEWS to
somehow indicate that, simply as an aid to comprehension -- so
that, when reading the NEWS for a final release, I don't have to
mentally diff it with that for the preceding RC, or go to the
effort of physically diffing them.

Thus, I'd prefer John's proposal, of essentially turning the RCs
from top-level headings into subheads under the final release
number.


A small improvement on that would be to put the per-RC subheads
under the class-of-change ones (see attached example1.txt.)  NEWS
contains enough non-"BUG FIX" entries for non-RC1 (pre)releases
to make this worth at least considering.)

Another alternative that would satisfy me as a user, but that
would presumably be more of a pain to implement, would be to roll
everything up into a single list as Karl suggests, but to label
each item (or at least, each post-RC1 item) with the
(pre)release it appeared in (see example2.txt).


All that said, I'm not too fussed about the presentation, but
please continue to indicate *somehow* which (pre)release a given
NEWS item first appeared in.

Thanks,
  - Eric
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bzr 1.13 [...]
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[snip]


bzr 1.12 "1234567890" 2009-02-13
--------------------------------

This release of Bazaar contains [lots of nifty stuff].

  [All other subsections snipped]

  BUG FIXES:

	* 1.12 RC1:
		* ``bzr annotate --show-ids`` doesn't give a backtrace on empty files
		  anymore.
		  (Anne Mohsen, Vincent Ladeuil, #314525)

		[snip]

		* Unshelve now handles deleted paths without crashing. (Robert Collins)

	* 1.12 final:
		* ``bzr init --development-wt5[-rich-root]`` would fail because of
		  circular import errors. (John Arbash Meinel, #328135)


bzr 1.11 [...]
--------------
[snip]
-------------- next part --------------
bzr 1.12 "1234567890" 2009-02-13
--------------------------------

This release of Bazaar contains [lots of nifty stuff].

  [Other subsections snipped]

  BUG FIXES:

	* ``bzr annotate --show-ids`` doesn't give a backtrace on empty files
	  anymore.
	  (Anne Mohsen, Vincent Ladeuil, #314525)

	[snip]

	* Unshelve now handles deleted paths without crashing. (Robert Collins)

	* (1.12 rc2) a fictional change to a fictional RC that I
	  made up for demonstration purposes

	* (1.12 final) ``bzr init --development-wt5[-rich-root]`` would fail because of
	  circular import errors. (John Arbash Meinel, #328135)

  [Other subsections snipped]