release notes file

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 01:52:11PM -0400, Mark Johnston wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 03:57:37PM +0200, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> > On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 03:18:18PM -0400, 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.
> > > 
> > > For example:
> > > 
> > > Index: RELNOTES
> > > ===================================================================
> > > --- RELNOTES	(nonexistent)
> > > +++ RELNOTES	(working copy)
> > > @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
> > > +Release notes for FreeBSD 13.0.
> > > +
> > > +r349286:
> > > +	swapon(8) can now erase a swap device immediately before
> > > +	enabling it, similar to newfs(8)'s -E option.  This behaviour
> > > +	can be specified by adding -E to swapon(8)'s command-line
> > > +	parameters, or by adding the "trimonce" option to a swap
> > > +	device's /etc/fstab entry.
> > > 
> > > What do folks think?
> > 
> > I do like this idea, and maybe it should be made in a parseable format, so that
> > it can serve to create some messages to display while running pkg upgrade (for
> > pkgbase).
> > 
> > pkg knows to only print message when going from a given revision of a package to
> > another (and only in this case) to avoid having too many noise to the output.
> 
> Can you explain a bit further?  I'm only familiar with pkg-message,
> which is unstructured and always printed AFAIK.

Since pkg 1.11 messages can be written in a structured format, see:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/pkg-files.html#porting-message

I am not asking for RELNOTES to be in the same format but something that can be
parsable with awk(1) for example and transformed into ucl base pkg-messages
would be imho useful for adding messages to pkgbase.

Best regards,
Bapt
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