Yes, after thinking about this this weekend, it is clear to me that in the future we will *need* a scheme where by the NEWS entry can be safely included in the patch in some form.

I think the commit message is also going to be in the patch, which will be in 'hg export' form, if I'm understanding the stuff the Mecurial folks were telling us at PyCon correctly.

So, in theory the script approach would still work, if anybody can run it (to commit locally and then export) and if what it produces is something that won't get stale.