On 13.09.2013 22:51, Brett Cannon wrote:
> 
> Brett Cannon added the comment:
> 
> I would argue, MAL, that what you want Misc/NEWS to be should instead be merged into the end of What's New. If something changed which could potentially break a user it should be listed in the most visible upgrade doc we have. Otherwise pouring through Misc/NEWS is a trudge and you might as well read the commit logs.

There are often lots of small changes between releases that don't
end up in the What's New, but which can still make changes necessary
in user applications. Also, "What' New" is often not updated for
patch level releases, so the NEWS file is the only source to
track patch level changes.

And again, no, going through commit messages does not give the
same kind of information as in the NEWS file :-)

As you can see in your auto-generated file, there are multiple
entries for the same ticket, some entries don't reference a ticket,
there's no structure in the file, it includes everything (including
changes that were reverted again before the release), etc.

The auto generation would only result in the same kind of NEWS
file if everyone were really stringent in the way they write commit
messages. With hg not supporting editing commit messages after
the fact (apart from perhaps the last one), this is bound to
cause extra overhead to e.g. fix typos, add more infos, remove/hide
unnecessary entries, etc. We're all humans after all ...