Re: [PATCH 0/6] Make 'git help everyday' work -> relnotes

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Jan 21, 2014, 22:14 UTC
Message-ID: <BA4E87FA92ED4E8FB2C00F013BD7B3FF@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <52D91B0E.6080000@atlas-elektronik.com>

From: "Stefan Näwe" <stefan.naewe@atlas-elektronik.com>

Show 28 quoted lines

> Am 16.01.2014 22:14, schrieb Philip Oakley:
>> From: "Stefan Näwe" <stefan.naewe@atlas-elektronik.com>
>> [...]
>>>
>>> I'd really like to see 'git help relnotes' working as well...
>>>
>>> Stefan
>>
>> Stefan,
>>
>> Were you thinking that all the release notes would be quoted verbatim 
>> in
>> the one long man page?
>>
>> Or that it would be a set of links to each of the individual text 
>> files
>> (see the ifdef::stalenotes[] in git/Documentation/git.txt)?
>>
>> The latter allows individual release notes to be checked, but still
>> leaves folks with a difficult search problem if they want to find 
>> when
>> some command was 'tweaked'.
>>
>> Obviously, any method would need to be easy to maintain. And the
>> RelNotes symlink would need handling.
>
> 'git help relnotes' should show the current release note with
> a link to the previous.

OK, that seems very sensible, as the concatenated release notes run to 15k lines!

Determining which is the current release note is possibly more problematic, which should be when making the documentation.

>
> And 'git help git' should link to the current release note.
>

In some sense that 'current' should be the same as the 'git --version', but through an assumption of a common distribution of git and the documentation, rather than any run time determination.

At the moment the Documenation/git.txt 'stalenotes' section could be separated into its own file to act as the basis for the links, but as yet I don't have a good view as to how the current release notes (with / without maint notes?) would be embedded without a maintenance burden for Junio.

Philip