Re: Enforcing use of NEWS

<quote who="Murray Cumming">

> GNOME package maintainers often don't use NEWS, so the GNOME release 
> announcements are vague. The release-team would like
> people to use NEWS, and we might even modify widget.gnome.org's install-module 
> script to read NEWS files automatically.

This is written, but it just sucks out NEWS and plonks you into an editor
with the contents, which are then appended to the ftp release notify email
(which goes to the release team right now, but there'll be a proper list for
it soon, for everyone). The tarball is not modified, this is just a last
opportunity to write something useful. 

If anyone has suggestions for a "standardised" NEWS format that we can
process (or fudge), without causing too much hassle for maintainers, please
let me know. That way maintainers can skip the install-module edit phase.

> In the meantime, Daniel Elstner pointed out to me that automake (probably >= 1.6)
> has a check-news feature. I suggest that people use it.
> 
> <danielk> murrayc: BTW regarding up-to-date NEWS files: recent automakes
> have a check-news option that's triggered on make dist.  I'm using it in
> regexxer
> <danielk> AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([check-news]) is all you need to set it
> globally
> <danielk> It just checks whether the current version number appears in
> the first few lines of NEWS.
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/manual/automake-1.7.2/html_chapter/automake_17.html

(Cc'ed full mail to gnome-hackers.)

- Jeff

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