release notes file

[Bjoern A. Zeeb]

On 23 Jun 2019, at 19:18, Mark Johnston wrote:

Hi,

> Today we add a Relnotes tag to commits that warrant a release note.
> My impression is that it doesn't work so well: if a committer forgets
> or doesn't know to add one there's no way to amend the commit message
> (same for MFCs), and a commit message isn't a convenient place to 
> write
> the text of a release note.  I would like to propose adding a 
> top-level
> RELNOTES file instead, which like UPDATING would document notes for
> specific commits.  It would be truncated every time the head branch is
> forked, and changes to it would be MFCed.  This fixes the
> above-mentioned problems and would hopefully reduce the amount of time
> needed by re@ to compile release notes.

Hooray.  Can we put that file into the doc repo, so that the ports 
people, and the docs people, and all other kinds of hats can put things 
in there as well?

Oh, the release notes go into the doc repo anyway.  Can we just put them 
in the right place and just fill them from a skeleton where they should 
be and naturally grow the document (feel free to use a different markup 
language once doc is ready for that).

Oh, with that release notes are written automatically and you are still 
responsible for that your stuff is in there.  And the release notes only 
need an editing pass in the end?

And the wiki pages like “What’s cooking for 13?” or similar could 
just vanish as we’d have these updated at least every 10 minutes 
automatically .. on our web server under /releases/ where they belong ..

How amazing would that be?


/bz