Re: Structured Changelogs for ELPA packages

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  > 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.

Let's contrast the issue of ELPA with the issue of compiler error
messages.

The compilers that Emacs users could initially run under M-x compile
mostly had nothing to do with the GNU Project.  (I expect that is
still true today.)  They were mostly released by companies that (1)
had no connection with GNU Emacs and (2) had no reason to cater to our
requests.  To get them to standardize their error message formats was
beyond us.  However, it was not a lot of work for us to write regexps
to extract the crucial data about the error location.

By contrast, packages in GNU ELPA are part of GNU Emacs.  Their
developers have a substantial relationship with GNU and the FSF.  It
is natural to ask them to use the GNU formats for NEWS files and
changelogs for these packages.  We can also develop tools to help
them do that.

NonGNU ELPA is a different case.  Those packages are not part of GNU
Emacs or the GNU Project, so we haven't got a basis to say they ought
to follow the GNU Emacs practices.

We can still ask them to do that; some will.  We should not expect
that all of them will, but it is good when they do, so let's ask them.

For NEWS files, I think we can write the code to transfer them to Atom
to handle the existing variety of formats, as far as is natural to do
so.  With luck, that will DTRT for most of the NonGNU ELPA packages.

Then we can suggest to the remaining NonGNU package maintainers that
it would be good for their users if they switch to a format that the
Atom broadcaster can handle.  I think most will do that.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)