GSoC 17: Release notes extension

[Augie Fackler]

(+Greg in case he's got opinions)

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 06:34:06AM +0530, Rishabh Madan wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am Rishabh Madan and I will be a GSoC applicant this year under Mercurial.
>
> I wanted to discuss about the Release notes extension project.[1]
> <https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/SummerOfCode/Ideas2017>
> I have gone through the mailing list discussions. I am currently
> understanding the intial patch sent by Gregory Szorc, for the releasenotes
> extension.
>
> I would like to get a few inputs for this project:
>
> 1. Commit message parser
> (i) I feel this is the core of the idea. From what I understand, we will
> have to keep a specific format for the commit messages that will be parsed
> and output will be stored in a changelog. But, this is a extension that
> would help other organizations as well. Do we expect them to abide by
> certain format for the commit message?

For now, I'd assume we'd implement our own parser and if others want
other formats, they'd need to send us patches.

> (ii) Is this going to be a hybrid process? I mean, will the notes once
> created be edited by maintainers at a later stage?

I suspect so - we've got varying levels of English, so some release
notes will necessarily require some copyediting eventually.

> (iii) The extension shouldn't add extremely small changesets to the
> changelog. I think this can be done by adding some keyword to the commit
> message (like [IGNORERST]).
>
> 2. Linking hgweb to release notes
> I found this idea quite intriguing. Can someone please elaborate a bit more
> on what exactly we're trying to accomplish with this?
>
> I also found some open source implementations like [2]
> <https://github.com/skywinder/github-changelog-generator> similar to this
> idea that might help in implementing this project.
>
>
> I would really appreciate if someone can point out the issues and features
> I may have missed. Also, any relevant resources or links for further
> readings would help too.

Another interesting approach is towncrier:
https://github.com/hawkowl/towncrier though I'm not in love with the
approach of commiting lots of short-lived files to the repository (I
much prefer having it in the commit message).

>
> Thanks.
> Rishabh Madan
> ᐧ

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