Create new changelog block from existing changelog

[Murrell, Brian]

On Mon, 2020-11-02 at 22:27 +0000, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> Hi Brian,

Hi Jelmer,

> I agree it would make sense to have *a* way of creating a new
> changelog
> entry as if the current user was running "dch". In that case,
> distributions would be set to UNRELEASED per convention rather than
> to
> the previous distributions.

I'm not familiar with dch, TBH, but I suspect given it's context here,
it creates a reasonable entry with minimal information, gleaning what
it can from previous entries.

> Whether that should be the default Changelog.new_block() command is a
> different question - Changelog is a fairly low-level interface.

I don't really have an opinion about that.  A new interface would be
just as reasonable.

>  If it
> defaulted to calling .get_maintainer() but then in some situations it
> raised an exception because get_maintainer() didn't see the right
> environment variables, I think that would be worse and more
> surprising
> than the current situation where you need to be explicit but
> have consistent behaviour regardless of the environment.

Perhaps.  I have only just started looking at the module.  You surely
have a more architectural view of it than I do at this point.

> Perhaps we could add a DWIM-style function for adding changelog
> entries?

Sure.  That's ultimately I think what I am looking for.  A more simple
way where reasonable default values are derived where they can be, and
of course over-ridable as needed.

Cheers,
b.