On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 1:16 PM, Bartosz Dziewoński matma.rex@gmail.comwrote:
On Thu, 07 Nov 2013 19:03:33 +0100, C. Scott Ananian < cananian@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Could we do an end run around to fix this? For example add a
Release-Notes: this text shows up in the release notes field to the commit. Before release branching, some slightly-fancier variant of "git log | egrep '^Release-Notes:'" gets run to automatically populate the release notes with the appropriate information. Then we don't have to fiddle with the merge algorithm. --scott
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/ Release_notes_automation
Both those proposals seem good to me. I'll add that "non-noteworthy commits" can always be marked in the commit message (an explicit 'Release-Notes: no' field, or [NOREL] in the subject or somewhere in the body, etc etc). That should further reduce the amount of manual release notes editing.
Merge drivers aren't nothing exceptionally fancy, and it wouldn't require much fiddling (I've already written the code that does the work and been using it since, it's perfect). But we need someone with access to appropriate parts of the infrastructure to set it up for gerrit/Jenkins, and I don't have it.
I thought the main problem there was that gerrit/Jenkins would still block the merge, even with a custom merge driver. But if that's not the case, then yes making edited RELEASE-NOTES Just Work is even simpler (maybe not better?). But I don't have the necessary access either... --scott