bug#81116: 31.0.60; [FR] ELPA: Include changelog in the Atom feeds

Daniel Mendler <[email protected]> writes:

> Philip Kaludercic <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> Daniel Mendler <[email protected]> writes:
>>
>>> The ELPAs come with Atom feeds:
>>>
>>> https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/.aggregated-feed.xml
>>> https://elpa.nongnu.org/nongnu/.aggregated-feed.xml
>>>
>>> I wonder if it is possible to include parts of the changelog (maybe
>>> only the last header) as part of the feed entries. Right now the feed
>>> entries only contain content like this:
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> In contrast I receive mails via the [email protected] list
>>> which contain this content, including parts of the changelog!
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>> One option I would like is that if maintainers are already curating a
>> CHANGELOG.org/NEWS.org file, that we try and check if a section is
>> annotated with a "current" tag or something like that.  Otherwise we
>> have to make assumptions about how the org file is structured (I assume
>> most people add new entries to the top of the file, because we trim off
>> a prefix) and parse that out.
>
> Philip, I am not sure if I had responded to your suggestion. 

You responded in
<[email protected]>, it just got
buried in my mailbox.

>                                                              
>                                                              I think we
> can simply try out various extraction/truncation methods. There is no
> risk.

One issue I think we want to keep in mind is that when we have changelog
files that are too long, we are burdening the server by serving more
data that spiders and RSS clients will periodically ping.

> Maybe it also helps nudging package maintainers to use a relatively
> uniform changelog format, e.g, Org files where the headlines contain the
> released version number as substring. For ELPA-devel snapshots it is
> less clear what to use.

For ELPA-devel I wouldn't argue that we need to worry about this too
much, since these are by definition not releases so there is no need for
complete changelogs.  But if we choose to promote a fixed org-mode
format, we can also fix some header tag like "devel" to select for
extraction.

> But as I wrote above, the mails which are sent to [email protected]
> already contain an excerpt of the changelog, so couldn't one simply do
> the same for the feed entries? The difficulty is probably that one has
> to checkout all versions and extract the changelog content when
> regenerating the new feed.

The reason I did not do that when we first implemented the feature is
that the result would be unsatisfying (to me) since basically all
entries would include either too little or too much information.

My suggestion would be to come up with some "privileged" formats for
changelog files and only include the changelogs from those files in the
RSS feeds.  To get the ball rolling, I would suggests the simplest
format would be to use org-mode as you suggested and extract only the
sections with a "release" tag for ELPA-regular and "devel" for
ELPA-devel.  If we think it is necessary/helpful, we can use properties
to annotate the specific versions of each release.

I would personally also like to continue supporting "News" sections
within the main files.  In that case, I could imagine requiring a format
like

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
;;; News:

;;;; Version X.Y.Z

;; Lorem Ipsum ...

;;; Version X.Y.Z-1

;; More Lorem Ipsum, but earlier ...
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

but those are less popular anyway, so we don't have to prioritize that
right now.

> Daniel