Re: Structured Changelogs for ELPA packages

Daniel Mendler <[email protected]> writes:

> Philip Kaludercic <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> So I think we should veer this conversation back to the question of
>> whether (actual) package maintainers would be OK with specifying a
>> strict format for NEWS files, with some fixed changelog heading style as
>> was previously mentioned, or if no agreement is viable and we should
>> instead try our best server-side to detect sections in as many file
>> formats as possible.
>
> My opinion is that it is better to do our best to support multiple
> possible formats, or simply rely on the git-based mechanism, which I had
> already described and which avoids fixing a format.
>
> I am a package maintainer and I maintain numerous changelogs, and then I
> am a user of multiple packages. As a maintainer, I want to keep the
> format I am using right now (Towncrier-like). As a user I would like to
> read changelogs from other packages, and I don't want to convince
> package maintainers to change the format they've used for years. While
> consistency is good, I am glad if package maintainers provide changelogs
> at all and there are more important things to do.
>
> However if there is still interest to only want to support a list of
> fixed formats, I suggest to support Towncrier-variants ("* <version>
> (date)" and maybe variants like "* Version version (date)") and Keep a
> Changelog "* [version] - date". Note that some package authors still use
> other styles (e.g. packages by Jonas and Prot). Maybe these styles could
> be supported too. I see nothing wrong with supporting multiple styles.
> There is lots of precedent already, think about error messages in
> compilation buffers for example.

Supporting multiple formats of headings is the easier problem, a regular
expression will be able to handle that.  For me the question I am more
fearful about is whether we want to support multiple _file_ formats.  As
we had mentioned, with Org it should be easy enough to extract the data
since we have all the functions to do so in Emacs, but as soon as you
add Markdown we'd have to implement some manual parsing and distinguish
between different kinds of headings, detect section endings on our own,
which feels like a nuisance just thinking about it.

(I am still disappointed that, beyond your own comment, we haven't
really heard back from any people who maintain packages that are on
ELPA.  It would be nice to have a better communication channel for
questions like these.)

> Daniel