Re: [flame] NEWS file is useless

[David Chisnall]

On 25 Nov 2009, at 22:39, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> There are actually three levels of change information ...
> NEWS  ... just the headlines
> ReleaseNotes ... some more detail
> ChangeLog ... everything
>
> Maybe you are right and we shouldn't bother with NEWS?  I'd be  
> interested to know what others think.

I'd be in favour of ditching NEWS and ChangeLog.

ChangeLog has less information, in a less useful format, than the svn  
logs and is a hold-over from CVS not storing repository-wide change  
information sensibly.  With svn log, you can get a log of change  
messages at any granularity that you like.  If anyone actually cares  
about ChangeLog then they can do 'svn log > ChangeLog' on their local  
machine.  Stuff in the svn log can be processed easily, and is easier  
for people to check than the ChangeLog, for example:

http://cia.vc/stats/project/gnustep
https://www.ohloh.net/p/gnustep/contributors/20800526629476

Release Notes should contain any major changes (new classes, new  
features, anything that breaks source or binary compatibility).  This  
should ideally be updated as part of any major change.

NEWS is for... Actually, I've no idea what I'd expect to find in  
NEWS.  Project news belongs on the web site, not in the svn repository  
(unless it's the /web branch of the repository...).  The lack of news  
on the web site is one of my biggest problems with it; unless you  
check cia.vc or ohloh.net, you'd think GNUstep was a dead project.  Do  
we even have a sensible way of writing news for the GNUstep site?   
Currently I put GNUstep-related things on the Étoilé blog[1], which is  
easy to write on (add Markdown file to repository, commit), but that's  
far from ideal.

David

[1] For example, http://etoileos.com/news/archive/2009/09/10/1744/

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