Separate branch for experimental)

[Joey Hess]

Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> Soon after I switched from CVS to Bazaar (bzr), I stopped using
> changelog files. Instead, before I make a release, I update a NEWS file
> which summarizes the changes since the previous release, and also add a
> dump of the commit messages (bzr log --long --verbose, more or less) to
> sit next the tarball, but that is not included in the package itself.
> 
> So far I'm happy with this solution.

That offloads the work of writing a good changelog onto the person who
makes the release. Probably works well for packages maintained by one
person, less well for packages maintained by lots of people all making
changes, and not very well at all for certian teams (ie d-i and
pkg-perl) where changes are made by some people, and released by often
entirely different people, who often need to release many packages all
at once.

When I try git-dch, it outputs too many lines like
  * fix dumb mistake
  * no, my fix for dumb mistake was a dumb mistake, actually
:-) I'm sure this looks better if all development on the release branch
is carefully constrained to consolodated changesets that don't reflect
the underlying development mess^Wprocess. Again, that may work well for some
projects, but is seriously ambitious for others.

BTW, the main merge issue with merging changelogs should be the 
" -- Author Name  <date>" line of the changelog. Avoid changing that line
and changelogs merge pretty well. Since the main reason dch updates that
line is so it can keep track of who made the last change (so it can put it
in "[ Author Name ]" form in the changelog), maybe there is a way to change
dch to not modify that line (except for with --release), and store the author
info elsewhere.

-- 
see shy jo
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