release process

["Sergey Udaltsov" <sergey udaltsov gmail com>]

Hi all

There is one thing I'd like to discuss from my yesterday's release experience.

The g-c-c release notes usually contain changes for every submodule in
g-c-c. Since submodules are managed by several people, it is somewhat
troublesome work to compose the NEWS file section. Of course, "svn
log" helps a lot (one does not have to gather all ChangeLogs) - but
since commit messages are free-form, it all requires a bit of manual
formatting.

Could/should we automate that work somehow? I could not find any
script which would help with that task.

What I'd propose is having two files: NEWS.since_last_stable and
NEWS.since_last. The maintainers of the submodules would put a list of
significant (user-visible?) changes in these files (it is not
necessarily to get to the level of every individual bug). That would
make release process much easier.

Comments are welcome. If I am missing something, please correct me.

Cheers,

Sergey