[Zope-dev] Re: Extend specification of how to maintain the changelog

[Tres Seaver]

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Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Tres Seaver wrote:
>> Christian Theune wrote:
> [snip]
>>> My preference would be to have more important changes first.
>> Please don't make it a judgement call:  keep it time-descending order,
>> just like the releases.  Among other things, this makes merge conflicts
>> more obvious, and easier to to fix.
> 
> With time-descending order you mean add more recent fixes to the top of 
> the section, right? Where 'section' is probably the 'bug fixes' or 
> 'features' section per release.

Right.  If we were really strict about the existing policy, then bug
fixes wouldn't be recorded on the trunk, only features, and there would
never be features added on maintenance / release branches.  That policy
also strongly suggests doing the initial fix on the oldest maintained
branch which has the bug, and then forward-porting it to newer branches
and the trunk.  Specifically, we don't "backport" bug fixes, we
"forward-port" them.  I've found that doing the fixes in that order has
two advantages:

 - Fixing it on the oldest branch first makes for a better diagnostic
   mode, with fewer assumptions about the code (because one isn't
   working in it regularly).

 - The fix stays minimal / conservative, because we don't make arbitrary
   cleanups / rearrangements to the code on the branches.

 - It is usually much easier to merge the minimal fix forward, even if
   a later branch has been tidied / refactored, than to merge backward.

If we change the policy to record all bugfixes in the trunk's changelog,
then I would still advocate grouping them:  it makes the release
manager's job simpler, since the groupings are more informative in an
announcement.


Tres.
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Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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