[Nano-devel] have release changes in changelog.gz and NEWS.gz for incompatible changes or NEW far-reaching features/implicatons.

[shirish शिरीष]

Hi all,

First of all commends to all the coders of nano who have made it one
of the better editors on the CLI.

Second, please CC me as I've disabled emails as I'm just
info-overloaded so even for projects I love, I have had to do this.
Anyways, most of the discussions in this specific mailing list would
be above my level (no programmer) so it would be in a sense useless
for me.

Having said the above, I do use nano quite a bit and enjoy it. I did
run into troubles sometime back and in the process along with help of
Benno uncovered a bug which was fixed in the new release (the set fill
column rules were not observed for user even if s/he has put the same
in her/is ~/.nanorc)

Anyways, coming to the point, I have always had a fascination for how
projects evolve and what changes happened with a specific project.
One of the things I do is share about the Debian project using various
packages and show them the changelog.gz and NEWS.gz in order to show
them the difference between the contents in the two files so the
concept is clear.

This is how it's been in my mind for several years and has been proved
to be right in thousands of packages -

changelog.gz - all changes, normal bug-fixes, smallish new features
are shared therein.

NEWS.gz - This is red. It usually is one of the first things besides
looking at my config files to see what broke the package. Many a time
it has helped me trouble-shooting a problematic package.

Now to my surprise, I saw that changelog.gz got stopped on 31st March
2016 and NEWS.gz has all the rest from then onwards.

For this, I also asked the same to Benno who shared the history behind
the change.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-nano/2016-12/msg00010.html

This in my limited knowledge and understanding makes it difficult to
troubleshoot the package, as I would have to parse/grep through it and
even then I would have to be lucky to know/get the right keywords in
order to see what the issue is.

Could people revert to the old way of working, have changelog.gz have
all the changes and just have NEWS.gz to give news of incompatible
changes or a BIG change which may break the package in corner cases,
unexpected ways.

Are there any objections for such a change ? Do people believe that
having changes in NEWS.gz adds any additional value which would not be
if changelog.gz is used.

Looking forward to know.

-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
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