If we provide a prebuilt Misc/NEWS in tarball, if Makefile doesn't need blurb if Misc/NEWS already exists, doko's issue is fixed: Debian package builder will not need blurb anymore (PR 2874).


> If the upstream patches are extracted from GitHub PRs, then they'd presumably have files in Misc/NEWS.d.  You could just ignore them.

If a vendor don't want to rely on blurb, I think that it's acceptable tradeoff.

Usually, each backported change is documented in a vendor specific changelog anyway.

Maybe tomorrow, some Linux vendors will start using blurb, but I suggest to work step by step, and first focus on the Python 3.5 "regression" fixed by PR 2874.

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> But you could run "blurb split", breaking Misc/NEWS into constituent files in Misc/NEWS.d, and then "blurb merge", rebuilding Misc/NEWS from those constituent files in Misc/NEWS.d.

I'm not following you. If you want to rebuild Misc/NEWS, why not just removing Misc/NEWS and then run blurb merge?

I expect that in a tarball, Misc/NEWS and Misc/NEWS.d contain exactly the same entries.