"what's new" document

[Martin Pool]

On 18 August 2010 17:26, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 7:20 PM, Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> wrote:
>
>> Also, I think we should clarify how we handle NEWS across series.  My
>> proposal is:
>>
>>  * a separate news file per series
>>  * don't copy bugs between series when they merge up; just say in the
>> header which previous-series releases were merged in.
>
> Two thoughts here.
> Firstly, this is harder on users. They have to chase points - a change
> in 2.3 which started in 2.0 will require three additional lookups -
> assuming only one point release at each point.
>
> Secondly its harder for bzr devs when multiple series are involved,
> because the automation involved in automatically closing bug tasks
> seems to be likely to be more complex to me.

It seems to depend a bit on question people are trying to answer.  The
thing I most often use NEWS for is as a cache of bugfixes/commits: if
I think "oh I thought we fixed that" then I scan through it to find
something.  (Sometimes I use the bzr log too, but being able to easily
edit it after the event makes news a bit more readable.)  If you want
to do that and you have a tree, it's true you have a few files to grep
but it's not that hard.

If you have a particular bug and you want to know "which bzr 2.2
release was this fixed in" it does make it a bit harder.  (But this is
not ideal at the moment, because manually merging up the changes may
be done inconsistently.)

-- 
Martin