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Re: Should we move 20.x related stuff out of NEWS ?


From: Juri Linkov
Subject: Re: Should we move 20.x related stuff out of NEWS ?
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2004 17:09:47 +0300
User-agent: Gnus/5.110002 (No Gnus v0.2) Emacs/21.3.50 (gnu/linux)

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:
> On Thu, 15 Apr 2004, Juri Linkov wrote:
>>I must say that having news for old releases in one file is very
>>inconvenient.  For example, isearching it for some newest feature, the
>>user can't see if the string that isearch displays is in the latest
>>version or in one of older versions!
>
> A beginning user will have this problem.  An experienced user will know
> to type C-c C-u, or at the very least C-h m to find the appropriate
> command.

Surely, the user can type C-c C-u after every isearch result.
The problem is only in its inconvenience.  C-c C-u doesn't
leave mark at previous position, so it's not easy to return
to previous position to continue isearch.

>>If having too many files is undesirable, then files for only _major_
>>releases could be created, with the NEWS file containing news for the
>>latest _minor_ release:
>
>>NEWS      -- news for 21.4
>>NEWS.21   -- news for 21.1, 21.2, 21.3
>>NEWS.20   -- news for all 20.*
>
> I disagree with Juri entirely here.  As a package developer, I'll often
> want to ask a question like "What's the earliest Emacs version that
> supports syntax-table text properties?", and a quick "C-h n C-s",
> followed up with a few "C-c C-u"s finds it easily enough.

You will not find an answer to your question in the NEWS file
if a feature was introduced in earlier Emacs versions described
in ONEWS(\.[1-9])?.

> If NEWS were to be split up as described, I'd have to formulate a grep
> command.

The current situation with news spread across multiple files
is not better.  However, one could write a script similar to
lib-src/grep-changelog.

> [Aside:  Emacs facilities for searching through several files
> seem strangely poor.]

There are M-x multi-occur-by-filename-regexp and `A' in Dired.
Or what did you mean?

> CC Mode is only just on the point of not supporting 19.34 any more.  It
> will carry on supporting 20.x for some years to come.  For this reason,
> I'd prefer NEWS to carry on carrying 20.x entries.

A split among O?NEWS(\.[1-9])? files is very arbitrary and can't
satisfy all different needs.

One reasonable solution would be to have only a pair of files:
NEWS with changes only for the latest release, and ONEWS for
all older releases.  So users have to search only two files.

> It all boils down to the question, what is NEWS for, and whom is it for?
> At the top of the file it says "history of user-visible changes".  To me,
> a "user" is somebody who's using Emacs to edit files (etc.), but when she
> starts writing packages, becomes something more than a user.

> "history of user-visible changes" doesn't seem to be an accurate
> discription of NEWS any more.  For the last major release, Emacs 21.1,
> user-visible changes occupy 2170 lines, "user-invisible"
> ("hacker-visible?") changes occupy 2196 lines.  Maybe an extract of NEWS
> containing only user-visible changes would be a good thing.

NEWS is only for users.  Hackers read news from ChangeLog files.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/





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