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

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Jan 22, 2014, 08:08 UTC
Message-ID: <D97049A7BB5848B6ABA211DB7D941196@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqbnz4svb7.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>

Show 9 quoted lines

> "Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:
>
>> I already have a local patch that creates a stalenote.txt file, and
>> includes that in a "release-notes(7)" man page, but it still leaves
>> the actual release notes in a separate plain text file, linked from
>> the man page, rather than being right at hand, which is what I think
>> readers would expect.
>
> Sorry, but I still do not get it.  If you have a script

Ah, no, it's not a script.

I had simply moved the content of the stalenotes section into its own file 'stalenotes.txt' which could then be included both within the git(1) section it came from, and a new release-notes(7) man page.

With that set up the Documentation/Makefile would generate the man pages, with their appropriate links, which can be accessed via the 'git help' command.

The big 'however' was that this would not actually include the latest release notes as literal text for immediate reading into the release-notes(7) man page, which would be my aim, and I think what Stefan had suggested as a preferred style.

Show 12 quoted lines

>                      that reads
> git.txt and extracts its stale-notes section to generate the source
> to be processed into release-notes(7), why can't that script also
> include the contents of the latest release notes inline into its
> output?
>
> My release notes are _not_ written to be compatible with/processable
> by AsciiDoc (they are meant to be mere plain text)---perhaps you are
> wondering if that would make it harder to maintain your script that
> produces release-notes.txt?
>
> Confused...

My thought was that the latest release note would be included as literal text, as noted above. Like you say, it may need to be a script, but I was being cautious about what extra work that would entail for each release.

Show 16 quoted lines

>
>>
>> My other question would be to ask how you normally manage the 
>> up-issue
>> of the stalenotes, and when you would normally create that section in
>> git(1) as I didn't see any ifdef::stalenotes[] being defined anywhere
>> else.
>
> I'm not sure if I am understanding the question right (up-issue?),
> but it used to be that the preformatted and web-reachable manual
> pages at k.org were processed with stalenotes defined (which by the
> way was disabled with adaa3caf "Meta/dodoc.sh: adjust to the new
> layout, 2011-11-15" on the todo branch), and 26cfcfbf "Add release
> notes to the distribution., 2007-02-13" used that facility to
> prepare something like this:
>

I hadn't looked back into that part of history. I was somehow expecting to see 'stalenotes' being defined somewhere in the current documenation preparation options, hence my question about when you would set 'stalenotes'.

I'll have a look back at that to see how it was used back then.

Show 10 quoted lines

>    docs/git.html
>        /git-cat-file.html
>        ...
>    docs/vX.Y.Z/git.html
>    docs/vX.Y.Z/git-cat-file.html
>                ...
>
> where the "latest" one lived immediately underneath docs/*, while
> older ones were in versioned subdirectories.
>