Re: Moving etc/NEWS around causing release branch merge to fail again

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2022 07:49:48 -0800
> 
> Merging the release branch is failing due to our practice of moving
> etc/NEWS around again.  Here's what I see:
> 
>     $ ./admin/automerge -r -n 1 -b -t -p
>     Resetting...
>     Pulling...
>     Merging...
>     merged ok
>     automerge: etc/NEWS has been modified
> 
> I'll see if I can find the time and energy to investigate this today,
> but otherwise it might be a couple of days until I'll merge emacs-29 to
> master again.  If anyone knows what's going on, please fix it or even
> better tell me which steps to take.

I did the merge.

I don't use admin/automerge, I use admin/gitmerge.el in an interactive
session.  It asked me whether to try resolving conflicts in NEWS; I
answered YES.  Then it said it finished successfully.  I compared
NEWS.29 on master with NEWS on the release branch, and saw that the
entry for external-completion-table was lost; so I added it manually
to NEWS.29.

Maybe the way gitmerge.el attempts to fix the conflicts in NEWS is
unreliable, and we should always do that manually?  OTOH, fixing such
probl;ems with NEWS is easy: in case there are too many diffs, just
copy NEWS from the branch to NEWS.29 on master, and commit that.

Do we edit NEWS.29 on master, ever?  If we do, we should refrain from
doing that.