Re: Support for bringing package change logs to the user's attention

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Christopher Done <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> As the author and maintainer of several Emacs Lisp packages, I'd like
> to
> discuss how change logs are brought to the user's attention.

[...]

The package format section of the README in Elpa already mentions:

- A "News:" section (or "NEWS" file) can/should be used to list the
  user-visible changes of each version.

It's not clear to me that anything is actually done with that
information. The relevant parsing function, if there were one, would be
in lisp-mnt.el, but it doesn't look like anything currently exists. But
if this were done, it would be good to stick to the News:/NEWS
convention, and add something to lisp-mnt.el that finds that (some of
the utility functions already in that file will make it easier).

It might not be necessarily to write a seen.el file: the package update
mechanism could maybe keep track of what version is being uninstalled as
the new one is installed, and then show the news that corresponds to the
diff. When updating many packages at once, it could collect news from
each one and show them in a single buffer.

Eric