[Zope3-dev] the maintenance of change logs

[Jim Fulton]

On Sep 22, 2006, at 11:47 AM, Martijn Faassen wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I am about to do a new egg release of zc.catalog and will be  
> putting out other eggs as well (to the cheeseshop as we now have  
> our own category there).
>
> I notice in the SVN that there have been quite a few changes to  
> zc.catalog. We do not have any CHANGES.txt or such, so it's very  
> hard for me to determine what in fact changed without digging  
> through SVN commit messages and such.
>
> So, I propose we start maintaining CHANGES.txt in packages, and  
> mark changes there when we make them.

I'd rather see this in projects, not packages.  So this would be in  
the root of an SVN project alongside of setup.py.
Maybe this is what you meant.


> The format I propose is in restructured text, like so:
>
> ==================
> zc.catalog changes
> ==================
>
> 0.2 (2006-11-22)
> ================
>
> Features added
> --------------
>
> * zc.catalog can now do even more wonderful things.
>
> Bugs fixed
> ----------
>
> * fixed a bug where zc.catalog wasn't doing the right thing.
>
> What do you think?

See what I've been doing for zc.buildout:

   http://svn.zope.org/zc.buildout/trunk/CHANGES.txt?view=auto

Some things to note:

I knit all of the .txt files, including documentation-oriented  
doctest files together in the distutils long description.  This  
causes the pypi page to be pretty informative:

   http://www.python.org/pypi/zc.buildout

The knitting happens in setup.py,
http://svn.zope.org/zc.buildout/trunk/setup.py?rev=70198&view=auto

While this is still pretty experimental, I'm pretty happy with it.

To make this work requires coordinating headings across all of the  
text files.  which lead to my use of *s in the root text files.

Also, for individual packages, I think we can be a little more  
lightweight.  For example, I think we can avoid separating features  
and bugs.

I also think it's nice to provide some information about status and  
plans.

I find putting dates on releases to be a bother.  If it's a bother  
for me, it's probably a bother for others.  Is it really worth it?

I've done a bad job of tagging releases,  I need to get better about  
that.

Finally, I'm experimenting with using launchpad for bugs:

   https://launchpad.net/products/zc.buildout/+bugs

and feature requests:

   https://features.launchpad.net/products/zc.buildout/

So far this is working OK. I haven't really stressed it. Launchpad  
makes this very easy to set up and I don't think they are allergic to  
having us create lots of projects.

Jim

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