Re: Merging release branch

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> What's the procedure with merging commits that change etc/NEWS on the
> release branch?  gitmerge.el insists on trying to merge those in
> etc/NEWS for the next release, which is not TRT.  One could skip the
> commits which change only etc/NEWS and then "merge" manually by
> copying branch/etc/NEWS into trunk/etc/NEWS.28, but isn't there a
> better way?  And why doesn't gitmerge.el do that automatically?

(I don't know how Glenn has done it until now.)

AFAIK, there is no strong need to name that file etc/NEWS until we
create a tarball or run "make install".  I think we should just keep the
file in etc/NEWS.NN even on the release branch.  That would avoid the
merging headache, and the file would also preserve its full history
between versions (no more moving the file).

If we want to do this, our build-scripts depend on there being an
etc/NEWS file, so they would need to be updated.