[rfc] news layout tweak

[Karl Fogel]

Eric Siegerman <lists08-bzr at davor.org> writes:
> 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.

I believe you want this, sure.  But do you believe that most users want
it?  Really? :-)

-Karl

> 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