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

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> 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.

Thanks, I'll try a manual merge next time.

> Maybe the way gitmerge.el attempts to fix the conflicts in NEWS is
> unreliable, and we should always do that manually?

I think it mostly either works, or it is clear how to fix it.  But it
was the first time I saw this particular error.

> 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.

Yup.  Perhaps we could even make automerge detect that, and do it for
us if needed (or at least let us know).  I'll put it on my TODO.

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

I've had to backport NEWS.28 changes from master to emacs-28 on at least
one occasion.  It is indeed better to avoid that.