moving away from changelog.dd?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, December 25, 2012 04:18:10 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/25/2012 3:41 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > I think that that's what most of us are agreed upon at this point. What is
> > currently the WHATSNEW section will continue to be done by hand, but the
> > LIBBUGSFIXED section will be autogenerated.
> 
> WHATSNEW is a list of new features, which are (or should be) in bugzilla as
> enhancement requests.

So, if we put a new module through the review process, we're going to go and 
create an ehancement request for it after the fact just so that it's in 
bugzilla and shows up in the automatically generated changelog? That seems off 
to me. Bugzilla is for reporting bugs or requesting that things be added to 
the language or library, not for reporting everything that we do. The SCM log 
is for that.

Also, some of those sorts of changes should probably get more prominence than 
they're likely to get in the middle of a list of bugzilla issues, or they may 
require further explanation.

And it's not like it takes much time or effort to maintain the the WHATSNEW 
section, as it's much smaller than the bug fix section.

> Various musings, rationales, future changes, etc., should go in a separate
> document called releasenotes.
> 
> I don't think it's viable to have a document half-generated automatically
> and half-editted by humans.

I really don't see why not. The section with new stuff gets written by hand and 
the bug fix section gets created with a bugzilla query. What's so hard about 
that? I don't think that we've been having any problems whatsoever dealing 
with the WHATSNEW section. It's the bug fix section that desperately needs 
automation in order to reduce the amount of human error in it and eliminate 
the tedium in having to make sure that it's up-to-date.

- Jonathan M Davis