[sane-devel] Upcoming changes for handling release notes

[Ralph Little]

Hi,

On 2021-12-29 1:30 p.m., Povilas Kanapickas wrote:
> 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
>
Sounds great!
Will we clean this directory out on every release?

Cheers,
Ralph