bug#20403: Format of NEWS (navigating in it)

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> > The change I'd actually like to see is for NEWS to just be a symlink
> > to the appropriate NEWS.xx file, which should exist under that name
> > from the outset of development on version xx.
>
> That'd cause trouble when merging from the release branch.  Symlinks
> complicate VCS operations in general.

Does that hold even if NEWS is a symlink also on the release branch?

If not, I'm thinking that the scripts for distributed tar balls could
then easily get rid of the symlink and move NEWS in place.

> If we want a better NEWS, I'd suggest to introduce a new mode, which
> will inherit from Outline mode, but will support some sort of
> "include" directive.  Then we could have a NEWS file that just
> "include"d the versioned files, and Emacs would display their
> contents, perhaps given some user command to expand a given version's
> news.  As a bonus, this would let us have a single NEWS file, from
> user's POV, like other (smaller) projects do.

That could also work.

(FWIW, I also think it would be nice to switch to org-mode.)

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas