[rfc] news layout tweak

[Martin Pool]

2009/3/12 Brian de Alwis <bsd at cs.ubc.ca>:
> Then the important stuff can be put at the top.
>
> [Tongue slightly in cheek:]  As a further justification, a higher number of
> RCs can even scare off a user as it may indicate a release that had a lot of
> teething problems and that may continue to have problems.
>
> The Eclipse Project, to compare, maintains a New & Noteworthy list of new
> features.  For each milestone release, they only list the changes to the
> previous milestone (e.g., 3.3 M1 -> M2): this is oriented towards the keen
> beans who track milestone by milestone.  But for the final release, the list
> is the total as compared to the previous release (e.g., 3.2 -> 3.3).  This
> benefits from the fact that the final release should identical to the last
> milestone (they have release candidates too, but they are treated
> identically to milestones and have no new features).

So I think we're doing pretty well in that regard: our news file shows
that we typically have between zero and three changes after one
release candidate.  If it was consistently zero it might show we
weren't testing the rcs enough; if it was more or there were repeated
rcs it would be insufficiently controlled.  Showing that this is
happening is one function of the NEWS file, though obviously it does
serve multiple purposes.

I could go for either of the layouts John suggested.  For people who
don't want detailed information, just the summary paragraph is enough.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>