[PATCH] Git release notes man page

[PATCH] Git release notes man page

[Philip Oakley]

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A few days too late for the 1.9.0 release cycle :(

This responds to Stefan Näwe's request for a 'git help' command that would
access the release notes. ($gmane/240595 17 Jan 2014).

I've used the full name "release-notes" for the help guide rather than
Stefan's original 'git help relnotes'.

The release-notes man page lists just the notes for the current release.
The combined notes for all releases is nearing 15k lines.

The one formatting niggle is that the included text is column shifted
such that the the raw text now starts at col 12 for the man page and
reaches past col 80. Is there an attribute setting to not indent the
included block text within a man page? It looks fine in --web format.

I used the code.google link, rather than kernel.org, for the previous
release notes to match the link currently used in git(1).

Philip Oakley (1):
  Provide a release-notes man page / guide

 Documentation/Makefile             |  1 +
 Documentation/gitrelease-notes.txt | 37 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 38 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/gitrelease-notes.txt

-- 
1.8.3.msysgit.0

[PATCH] [PATCH] Provide a release-notes man page / guide

[Philip Oakley]

Use the symlinked RelNote file as a list-block to
act as the core of the release-notes man page.

The mantainers work load should not be affected.

Signed-off-by: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
---

The included lines are inset 11 spaces by the man page
asciidoc formatting so some are more than 80 characters long.
No negative indent mechanism for the list block was found -
suggestions welcomed.

The use of the stalenotes section from git(1) was rejected.

The stalenotes, with over two hundred links, has greater than
2 digits allowed in the trailing link list on the man page,
so would miss the hundreds digit.

Also the html links for the "documentation for release x.y.z"
(at kerenel.org) are to html files that are not actually made
by the makefile.
---
 Documentation/Makefile             |  1 +
 Documentation/gitrelease-notes.txt | 37 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 38 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/gitrelease-notes.txt

diff --git a/Documentation/Makefile b/Documentation/Makefile
index fc6b2cf..b599b1f 100644
--- a/Documentation/Makefile
+++ b/Documentation/Makefile
@@ -29,6 +29,7 @@ MAN7_TXT += gitdiffcore.txt
 MAN7_TXT += gitglossary.txt
 MAN7_TXT += gitnamespaces.txt
 MAN7_TXT += gitrevisions.txt
+MAN7_TXT += gitrelease-notes.txt
 MAN7_TXT += gittutorial-2.txt
 MAN7_TXT += gittutorial.txt
 MAN7_TXT += gitworkflows.txt
diff --git a/Documentation/gitrelease-notes.txt b/Documentation/gitrelease-notes.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..29d9b1b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/gitrelease-notes.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+gitrelease-notes(7)
+===================
+
+NAME
+----
+gitrelease-notes - the onward progress of the stupid content tracker
+
+
+SYNOPSIS
+--------
+[verse]
+'git help release-notes'
+
+DESCRIPTION
+-----------
+
+Provide the release notes for the latest (possibly
+unreleased) version of Git, that is available from 'master'
+branch of the `git.git` repository.
+
+RELEASE NOTES
+-------------
+
+----
+include::../RelNotes[]
+----
+
+OLDER RELEASE NOTES
+-------------------
+
+Release notes for older versions are available in the Git source
+Documentation/RelNotes/ folder. This is currently available at
+https://code.google.com/p/git-core/source/browse/
+
+GIT
+---
+Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite
-- 
1.8.3.msysgit.0

Re: [PATCH] Git release notes man page

[Junio C Hamano]

Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:

> A few days too late for the 1.9.0 release cycle :(
>
> This responds to Stefan Nwe's request for a 'git help' command that would
> access the release notes. ($gmane/240595 17 Jan 2014).
>
> I've used the full name "release-notes" for the help guide rather than
> Stefan's original 'git help relnotes'.
>
> The release-notes man page lists just the notes for the current release.
> The combined notes for all releases is nearing 15k lines.

RelNotes are incremental and only useful for those who know what the
immediately previous release contained, but for most people who get
their Git from distros, I have this impression that the versions of
Git they get skip versions, and seeing the notable changes since the
previous source release will not give them wrong information---they
may have this warm fuzzy feeling that they know what is going on,
but they are missing information on all the accumulated changes that
were added in earlier versions their distro skipped---these changes
are still in the version they are running.  I do not understand why
it is even a good idea to show release notes from the command line
"git" interface.

Re: [PATCH] Git release notes man page

[Philip Oakley]

From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>
> Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:
>
>> A few days too late for the 1.9.0 release cycle :(
>>
>> This responds to Stefan Nwe's request for a 'git help' command that 
>> would
>> access the release notes. ($gmane/240595 17 Jan 2014).
>>
>> I've used the full name "release-notes" for the help guide rather 
>> than
>> Stefan's original 'git help relnotes'.
>>
>> The release-notes man page lists just the notes for the current 
>> release.
>> The combined notes for all releases is nearing 15k lines.
>
> RelNotes are incremental and only useful for those who know what the
> immediately previous release contained, but for most people who get
> their Git from distros, I have this impression that the versions of
> Git they get skip versions, and seeing the notable changes since the
> previous source release will not give them wrong information---they
> may have this warm fuzzy feeling that they know what is going on,
> but they are missing information on all the accumulated changes that
> were added in earlier versions their distro skipped---these changes
> are still in the version they are running.

That's a reasonable argument. I did look at trying to get the 
"stalenotes" to work as an alternative, that is extract the stalenotes 
section from the git.txt, and create a release notes man page from that. 
However there were two issues there that I couldn't solve (noted in the 
cover letter).

The first is that the man page generator does not expect more than 99 
references so the link numbers repeat themselves. I'm sure that is 
fixable by someone who knows the insides of acsiidoc.

The other was that the links for the main version documentation appear 
to been to be made at kernel.org, so that links back there are created. 
Again I wasn't sure how that should be resolved.

>   I do not understand why
> it is even a good idea to show release notes from the command line
> "git" interface.

My looking at this came from Stefan's suggestion noted above 
$gmane/240595. So it had at least one follower ;-)

Philip
-- 

Re: [PATCH] Git release notes man page

[Junio C Hamano]

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

> Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:
>
>> A few days too late for the 1.9.0 release cycle :(
>>
>> This responds to Stefan Nwe's request for a 'git help' command that would
>> access the release notes. ($gmane/240595 17 Jan 2014).
>>
>> I've used the full name "release-notes" for the help guide rather than
>> Stefan's original 'git help relnotes'.
>>
>> The release-notes man page lists just the notes for the current release.
>> The combined notes for all releases is nearing 15k lines.
>
> RelNotes are incremental and only useful for those who know what the
> immediately previous release contained, but for most people who get
> their Git from distros, I have this impression that the versions of
> Git they get skip versions, and seeing the notable changes since the
> previous source release will not give them wrong information---they

Ehh,, s/will not give them/will give them/; obviously...

> may have this warm fuzzy feeling that they know what is going on,
> but they are missing information on all the accumulated changes that
> were added in earlier versions their distro skipped---these changes
> are still in the version they are running.  I do not understand why
> it is even a good idea to show release notes from the command line
> "git" interface.

Re: [PATCH] Git release notes man page

[Stefan Näwe]

Am 18.02.2014 23:54, schrieb Philip Oakley:
> From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>
>>   I do not understand why
>> it is even a good idea to show release notes from the command line
>> "git" interface.
> 
> My looking at this came from Stefan's suggestion noted above 
> $gmane/240595. So it had at least one follower ;-)

Yes, but I could definitely live without it.
I compile git myself on most systems and that would just be a
convenient way to get an overview of the latest changes.

Regards,
  Stefan
-- 
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python -c "print '73746566616e2e6e616577654061746c61732d656c656b74726f6e696b2e636f6d'.decode('hex')"

Re: [PATCH] Git release notes man page

[Junio C Hamano]

"Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:

>> RelNotes are incremental and only useful for those who know what the
>> immediately previous release contained, but for most people who get
>> their Git from distros, I have this impression that the versions of
>> Git they get skip versions, and seeing the notable changes since the
>> previous source release will not give them wrong information---they
>> may have this warm fuzzy feeling that they know what is going on,
>> but they are missing information on all the accumulated changes that
>> were added in earlier versions their distro skipped---these changes
>> are still in the version they are running.
>
> That's a reasonable argument.

I am not making an "argument" in order to reject the notion of
making release-notes available, though. I am only raising concerns,
pointing out why showing a single release notes as if that were the
only one that matter is misleading.

I am not opposed to the idea of making release notes available to
those who do not install from the source, by the way. Being able to
grep the release notes through may help people who are writing
scripts using Git to learn when a feature they want to use appeared
to make sure that they do not depend on something their users may
not have yet. But for that kind of users, it would be more helpful
to point them at the file location they can find the plain text
version of release notes, instead of giving them a bunch of web
links they need to read through page by page.

> I did look at trying to get the
> "stalenotes" to work as an alternative, that is extract the stalenotes
> section from the git.txt, and create a release notes man page from
> that.

I am not sure if stale-notes section meshes well with this; the
primary purpose of it was to point at the whole documentation set,
not just release-notes, for versions previously released, so those
who came to a website that hosts them can pick the version, possibly
a stale one, that they are using and read the manual pages for that
version, without seeing newer features that are not available to
them.  I do not think it is very useful in the context of your "You
received this single version of software, and you can access its
documentation off-line" feature---you cannot reasonably expect that
such a software release to contain all the past documentation sets,
but even if you could do so, that is not how normal people use the
installed documentation, i.e. to learn about older releases that
they no longer have.