[sane-devel] Upcoming changes for handling release notes

[Povilas Kanapickas]

Hi Ralph,

On 12/29/21 11:57 PM, Ralph Little wrote:
> 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?

Yes, the release notes will be copied to the NEWS document and then we
will remove the copied files.

The upcoming 1.1.0/1.0.33 release will be slightly different because
several features have already been added after the branch off, but the
basic idea stands.

Cheers,
Povilas