Re: [Nano-devel] have release changes in changelog.gz and NEWS.gz for incompatible changes or NEW far-reaching features/implicatons.

[Benno Schulenberg]

Hello Shirish,

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016, at 15:09, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Anyways, coming to the point, I have always had a fascination for how
> projects evolve and what changes happened with a specific project. [...]
> 
> changelog.gz - all changes, normal bug-fixes, smallish new features
> are shared therein.

Not quite.  In fact, /everything/ gets mentioned therein, /all/ changes
-- that's why it's called a changelog, a log of changes.  The idea is
that if some day a developer finds a problem with some function, he/she
can search through the changelog to see which changes have been made to
this function over time, and see if maybe one of those changes rings a
bell, raises suspicion of possibly causing trouble.  Such a log file
was essential in the times before version control systems.  But these
days we have git.  The developer can just do 'git log -p somefile.c'
and search for the function name.  They will not just get the commit
message but also the exact code changes.  Or, if you know that some
feature worked in an earlier version, there is 'git bisect': there is
no need to laboriously interpret a changelog to figure out what change
might have caused the problem -- 'git bisect' will find the precise
commit that broke things within ten, fifteen minutes, half an hour,
with just a bit of iteration.

> NEWS.gz - This is red. It usually is one of the first things besides
> looking at my config files to see what broke the package. Many a time
> it has helped me trouble-shooting a problematic package.
>
> Now to my surprise, I saw that changelog.gz got stopped on 31st March
> 2016 and NEWS.gz has all the rest from then onwards.

The things that go into the NEWS file have not changed: for nano
it has always been a record of the release announcements.

> This in my limited knowledge and understanding makes it difficult to
> troubleshoot the package, as I would have to parse/grep through it and
> even then I would have to be lucky to know/get the right keywords in
> order to see what the issue is.

Of the last four versions of nano, what would you have liked to
see in the NEWS file?  And all other things left unmentioned?

> Could people revert to the old way of working, have changelog.gz have
> all the changes and just have NEWS.gz to give news of incompatible
> changes or a BIG change which may break the package in corner cases,
> unexpected ways.

As said above, the function of the NEWS file has not changed.
It's just the Changelog that got discontinued when we moved to
git.  Because git is all you need when you want to troubleshoot.

Benno

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