[PATCH RFC] contrib: script to generate release notes from commit messages

[Sean Farley]

Augie Fackler <raf at durin42.com> writes:

> On Thu, Feb 02, 2017 at 11:56:29PM -0800, Gregory Szorc wrote:
>> # HG changeset patch
>> # User Gregory Szorc <gregory.szorc at gmail.com>
>> # Date 1486108530 28800
>> #      Thu Feb 02 23:55:30 2017 -0800
>> # Node ID 5fe78521b9cb553b9a7c6bd4d96576a35b8d3517
>> # Parent  abf029200e198878a4576a87e095bd8d77d9cea9
>> contrib: script to generate release notes from commit messages
>>
>> Per discussion on the mailing list, we want better release notes.
>>
>> This patch introduces a script for producing better release notes.
>
> Did you look at adapting towncrier from hawkowl on github at all? I'm
> sure it's git-only now, but maybe that's easy to adapt?
>
> (I suspect you did look, but wanted to be sure. That said, this ain't
> much code...)
>
> Overall, I think I'm pretty happy with this approach, though since I'm
> the one that brought it up I guess that's unsurprising. How does this
> handle the file being copy-edited mid-stream? That is, if I copy-edit
> one of the release note lines, will it get clobbered by future runs of
> the tool?
>
> As for who and when, if we don't expect much copyediting before
> release time, maybe the thing to do is to just run this as part of the
> release process and do the copyediting then? Or if we do, we could
> just have a bot do it on mercurial-scm.org as part of the accept
> process tooling.

We could also do some kind of hybrid approach of committing a file (or
files) that apply a patch (or some kind of transformation) to the commit
message. Just thinking out loud here.