release notes file

[Ian Lepore]

On Sun, 2019-06-23 at 15:18 -0400, Mark Johnston wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Today we add a Relnotes tag to commits that warrant a release note.
> My impression is that it doesn't work so well: if a committer forgets
> or doesn't know to add one there's no way to amend the commit message
> (same for MFCs), and a commit message isn't a convenient place to
> write
> the text of a release note.  I would like to propose adding a top-
> level
> RELNOTES file instead, which like UPDATING would document notes for
> specific commits.  It would be truncated every time the head branch
> is
> forked, and changes to it would be MFCed.  This fixes the
> above-mentioned problems and would hopefully reduce the amount of
> time
> needed by re@ to compile release notes.
> 
> For example:
> 
> Index: RELNOTES
> ===================================================================
> --- RELNOTES	(nonexistent)
> +++ RELNOTES	(working copy)
> @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
> +Release notes for FreeBSD 13.0.
> +
> +r349286:
> +	swapon(8) can now erase a swap device immediately before
> +	enabling it, similar to newfs(8)'s -E option.  This behaviour
> +	can be specified by adding -E to swapon(8)'s command-line
> +	parameters, or by adding the "trimonce" option to a swap
> +	device's /etc/fstab entry.
> 
> What do folks think?
> 

I think it's a very good idea.

-- Ian