Re: announce-gen

[Reuben Thomas]

On 29 April 2011 21:21, Jim Meyering <address@hidden> wrote:
> Reuben Thomas wrote:
>> I'm trying to prepare a small cosmetic patch to fix up a couple of
>> things I find myself manually fixing up:
>>
>> 1. "./NEWS". I considered replacing this with the basename of the NEWS
>> file, but in fact it seems to me it's better to use the literal "NEWS"
>> since that makes more sense in the email. What do you think?
>
> Neither would work.
> Using the basename wouldn't work in general, since it might be
> invoked with --news=$(srcdir)/NEWS --news=$(srcdir)/sub-project/NEWS
>
> If you simply remove any "./" prefix, that would be great.

OK.

>> 2. In the email subject, better use $package_name $curr_version than
>> $my_distdir.
>
> All of my announcement Subjects have used $my_distdir (i.e., package-X.Y)
> for years.  You can see that policy reflected in README-release's
> suggested "Subject: coreutils-X.Y released [stable]", too.
>
> Yet you prefer to use a space in place of the "-"?

Yes, because the subject of an email should be human language, not
computerese. I am releasing, for example, "zile 2.3.24", not
"zile-2.3.24". Really, even that is not ideal. In autoconf terms, I
would rather have PACKAGE_NAME VERSION (in this case, "Zile 2.3.24").
But removing the space gets almost all of the effect intended for much
less effort (as PACKAGE_NAME isn't available in announce-gen, and
confusingly PACKAGE is called $package_name).

> This seems pretty deeply seated to me, and I'd rather not change it.

Announcing things with human-readable typography rather than
computer-readable typography seems deep-seated just about everywhere
else I look.

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