RFC: Handling of NEWS with N active branches

[Ian Clatworthy]

Martin Pool wrote:
> 2009/8/31 Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net>:

>> And in 3 or 4 months time, a fix done for 2.0 and merged to bzr.dev will
>> be many pages apart, and the ordering in the NEWS file will make it even
>> harder to tell what it means for 'something fixed in 2.0.1' unless we
>> sort NEWS chronologically, not numerically.
> 
> That does seem to make sense.
> 
> It does mean that somebody merging 2.0 to bzr.dev will need to: work
> out what NEWS items are new, and then copy them up into the
> as-yet-unreleased section at the top.
> 
> There are other things we'd like to do, but they could be done separately
> 
>  * more easily pull data (eg the release notes) out of NEWS

FWIW, one of my doc wishlist items is to split the Release Notes up by
release so that it gets displayed as a set of topics, not one
mega-document. Then users can more easily print the notes for the recent
versions which interest them.

I suspect it still makes sense to keep NEWS as one document wrt 'source'
content and to do the splitting as a post-processing step.

Ian C.