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

Philip Kaludercic <[email protected]> writes:

> Daniel Mendler <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> Philip Kaludercic <[email protected]> writes:
>>
>>>> But indeed, I wouldn't worry too much, and if the snapshot feeds are not
>>>> great, so be it. I usually write "* Development" headers in my
>>>> changelog, so if you scan for headers including the string "devel" it
>>>> would work.
>>>
>>> To be clear, I was not thinking about just scanning headers, but using
>>> `org-export-select-tags'.  We should probably get some Org people in for
>>> ideas if we decide to go this way.
>>
>> Okay, yes, but I am not in favor of requiring :tags: in changelogs.
>
> I would be interested to hear why not.  It would of course not be
> required in general, just to get the "better" changelog support

In my opinion it is better to be more permissive, and not prescribe a
fixed format, in order to increase adoption. Ideally this should just
work. I have little interest in adapting my changelogs for instance, if
a simple scan would just work as well. The scanner could be tested
against a few changelog formats which are currently used by ELPA
packages.

>> We could use the Org parser to iterate over the headings
>> (org-map-entries) and then search the title for the version or devel
>> string.
>
> I wasn't aware that Org exposed that API, that would make it easier
> indeed.  We would then still have to go through all the entries, filter
> out those that match the regular expresion, parse out the version number
> and then pick the newest one.

My suggestion would be to rather filter the headlines which match the
version string instead of actually parsing a format. It must not be
perfect.

>> But I wonder - is Org the only supported format? I am okay with Org of
>> course and I prefer it, but I had assumed that Markdown or plain text
>> works as well. This is why I suggested the regexp approach.
>
> I think it is better to just fix a single format for these improve
> changelogs, as that will make it easier for us in the future, and I'd
> say Org is better to that end than Markdown let alone plain text since
> it has an authoritative parser and good extensibility, if we do decide
> that we need something that property drawers could be useful for in the
> future.

I don't think this is the way. I am in favor of being more permissive,
and just handle the changelogs which are already there.

To be clear, this feature request is really a low priority detail, where
the packaging infrastructure could be polished, hopefully with little
effort. But if it means that we have to prescribe a rigid changelog
format, create unnecessary churn, or if the implementation is too
complicated on the ELPA side, I think we should not do it.

>>>>>> Daniel