"W. Trevor King" <wking@drexel.edu> writes:

> ** NEWS file

Speaking as the package maintainer, I would like a ‘ChangeLog’ file
separate from a ‘NEWS’ file.

The ‘NEWS’ file would continue to be hand-edited, and would be a
high-level view of user-visible changes in the project each version.
Users could reasonably expect to be interested in this file when
installing a new version. It would also make sense to retire old news
From this file once it becomes sufficiently old, to keep it relevant to
users to read.


The ‘ChangeLog’ would be an automatically-generated changelog of
low-level changes, not for general human consumption but for letting
recipients have a fighting chance at knowing the historical context of a
particular change without access to the VCS. It would probably be best
done as Trevor says:

> Depending on our level of masochism, either something starting out
> along the lines of [2]
>   bzr log --gnu-changelog -n1 -r 200..

That makes it necessary to add the changelog file to the tarball, since
it won't be a file tracked by VCS and therefore won't be exported. Not a
problem::

    $ release_version="1.0.0"
    $ release_name="be-$release_version"
    $ tarball_file=../$release_name.tar.gz
    $ work_dir=$(mktemp -t -d)
    $ export_dir=$work_dir/$release_name
    $ changelog_file=$export_dir/ChangeLog

    $ bzr export $export_dir
    $ bzr log --gnu-changelog -n1 -r ..tag:"$release_version" > $changelog_file
    $ tar -czf $tarball_file $export_dir
    $ rm -r $work_dir/

    $ ls $tarball_file
    ../be-1.0.0.tar.gz
    $ tar -tzf $tarball_file | grep ChangeLog
    be-1.0.0/ChangeLog

-- 
 \        “I bought a dog the other day. I named him Stay. It's fun to |
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Ben Finney