release notes file

[Mark Johnston]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 03:57:37PM +0200, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 03:18:18PM -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 do like this idea, and maybe it should be made in a parseable format, so that
> it can serve to create some messages to display while running pkg upgrade (for
> pkgbase).
> 
> pkg knows to only print message when going from a given revision of a package to
> another (and only in this case) to avoid having too many noise to the output.

Can you explain a bit further?  I'm only familiar with pkg-message,
which is unstructured and always printed AFAIK.

> I think it would be a nice feature for pkgbase :)