Re: [PATCH] {maint} news: break up in two files, one for maint, one for master

[Stefano Lattarini]

Hi Eric, thanks for the feedback.

On 04/26/2012 04:17 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 04/26/2012 03:30 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>> This will avoid a lot of useless conflicts or botched merges in the
>> NEWS file.  These have already happened many times with our old setup
>> where there was just one NEWS files.
>>
>> * NEWS: Removed, split into ...
>> * NEWS.maint, old/NEWS: ... these two files.
>> * NEWS.master: New file, still empty (it will be filled in master
>> only).
>> * Makefile.am (EXTRA_DIST): Distribute them.
>> (NEWS): Generate it by properly concatenating the three new files.
> 
> Ah, so there is still a NEWS file in tarballs, it's just that the split
> makes it easier to ensure that the generated NEWS file is always in the
> correct order regardless of which branch you are building the tarball
> from, and that merging one branch into another won't hit any conflicts
> because the NEWS items in the various branches go to the correct
> building-block in the first place.  Seems like an interesting solution.
> 
Well, honestly, thinking about the issue again, I'm not sure this patch
is truly warranted.  Let me elaborate on this.

Most of the confusion and mess-ups with NEWS in the 1.11.x series have
been due to the fact that we had in fact *three*, not two, versions of
NEWS, weirdly inter-related and conflicting: one in maint, one in
branch-1.11 (were the changes from maint almost never merged cleanly)
and one in master (where the changes from maint merged more-or-less
cleanly, but which had to be manually resynced with the ones in
branch-1.11, to make it appear as it was a follow-up to that -- which
it was according to the history of distribution tarballs, but not
according to the history in the version control system -- aargh!

Now that we only have 'master' and 'maint' as long-lived branches
(ok, there's 'ng/master' as well, but there we have a separated
file 'NG-NEWS'), the NEWS changes should merge and sync easily and
cleanly.

So I wish to take back my proposed patch, and substitute it with
a trivial patch that just edit '.gitattributes' not to specify the
"union" merge driver for NEWS anymore.

WDYT?

Thanks, and sorry for the confusion,
  Stefano