[sane-devel] Upcoming changes for handling release notes

[Povilas Kanapickas]

Hello,

There were some discussions on how to make handling release notes easier
in the past so that releases are not as difficult. Time has come to
actually implement them.

What changes?

Developers will need to write a short one or two sentence description to
a new file in newsfragments directory when submitting the feature for
review. That's it.

Longer version:

We'll write release notes as part of merge requests that introduce the
features or bug fixes instead of deferring everything until the release
time comes.

This has the benefit that the release notes will be written by a more
knowledgeable person than the release manager and we will not wait
months only to forget what merge request was actually about. The side
benefit of this will be that creating releases will become easier as no
one will need to hunt all merge requests that comprise the release.

The release notes for unreleased features will be stored in
"newsfragments" directory in the repository. At the time of the release,
the files will be combined into a single text block, edited by the
release manager and added to the NEWS file. Storing release notes in
separate files before the release makes it easy to avoid merge conflicts.

Like I said above, for the developers almost nothing changes: just add a
new file to the newsfragments directory with a one sentence description
before creating a merge request.

I've created a merge request with all unreleased changes since 1.0.32,
you can see how the new process looks like in practice:
https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/-/merge_requests/676

Regards,
Povilas