bug#20403: Format of NEWS (navigating in it)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 22:56:50 +1300
> From: Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz>
> Cc: Ulrich Windl <Ulrich.Windl@rz.uni-regensburg.de>, 20403@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> The change I'd actually like to see is for NEWS to just be a symlink
> to the appropriate NEWS.xx file, which should exist under that name
> from the outset of development on version xx.

That'd cause trouble when merging from the release branch.  Symlinks
complicate VCS operations in general.

If we want a better NEWS, I'd suggest to introduce a new mode, which
will inherit from Outline mode, but will support some sort of
"include" directive.  Then we could have a NEWS file that just
"include"d the versioned files, and Emacs would display their
contents, perhaps given some user command to expand a given version's
news.  As a bonus, this would let us have a single NEWS file, from
user's POV, like other (smaller) projects do.