Re: announce-gen

[Jim Meyering]

Reuben Thomas wrote:
> I'm trying to prepare a small cosmetic patch to fix up a couple of
> things I find myself manually fixing up:
>
> 1. "./NEWS". I considered replacing this with the basename of the NEWS
> file, but in fact it seems to me it's better to use the literal "NEWS"
> since that makes more sense in the email. What do you think?

Neither would work.
Using the basename wouldn't work in general, since it might be
invoked with --news=$(srcdir)/NEWS --news=$(srcdir)/sub-project/NEWS

If you simply remove any "./" prefix, that would be great.

> 2. In the email subject, better use $package_name $curr_version than
> $my_distdir.

All of my announcement Subjects have used $my_distdir (i.e., package-X.Y)
for years.  You can see that policy reflected in README-release's
suggested "Subject: coreutils-X.Y released [stable]", too.

Yet you prefer to use a space in place of the "-"?

This seems pretty deeply seated to me, and I'd rather not change it.
I guess you could add an optional filter in the release-prep command,
have it default to empty,

# FIXME: describe
release_prep_filter_ =?

        ...
        $(MAKE) -s announcement $(release_prep_filter_) \
          > ~/announce-$(my_distdir)

and have it change $(my_distdir) to your preferred
"$(PACKAGE) $(VERSION)"