I would like fixing NEWS to be the top infrastructure improvement project, as it is my biggest time waster, and certainly the most obnoxious. It definite makes working on Idle less pleasant.

Since an empty 3.4.2a1 section was added to 3.4 NEWS, after 3.4.1 was released, Idle news items always fail to merge *even when there is no real conflict*.  I think the problem is the offset of hundred of lines (now a thousand) between the position in the 3.4 file and the position in the 3.5 file.  The hg merge jams the Idle entry somewhere in the middle of the Library section, creating spurious and bizarre-looking merge 'conflicts', instead of looking far enough down in 3.5 NEWS to find the proper context for successful insertion.

I am not the only person this happens to, as the same should be true for all the other sections that come after the Library section.  A couple of months ago, someone pushed a post-push patch to remove artifacts not properly removed before the original push.  Today I just removed what looked like an artifact from a Demo news item.