view CONTRIBUTING @ 32778:91e355a0408b

releasenotes: command to manage release notes files

Per discussion on the mailing list, we want better release notes
for Mercurial.

This patch introduces an extension that provides a command for
producing release notes files. Functionality is implemented
as an extension because it could be useful outside of the
Mercurial project and because there is some code (like rst
parsing) that already exists in Mercurial and it doesn't make
sense to reinvent the wheel.

The general idea with the extension is that changeset authors
declare release notes in commit messages using rst directives.
Periodically (such as at publishing or release time), a project
maintainer runs `hg releasenotes` to extract release notes
fragments from commit messages and format them to an auto-generated
release notes file. More details are explained inline in docstrings.

There are several things that need addressed before this is ready
for prime time:

* Moar tests
* Interactive merge mode
* Implement similarity detection for individual notes items
* Support customizing section names/titles
* Parsing improvements for bullet lists and paragraphs
* Document which rst primitives can be parsed
* Retain arbitrary content (e.g. header section/paragraphs)
  from existing release notes file
* Better error messages (line numbers, hints, etc)

Our full contribution guidelines are in our wiki, please see:

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ContributingChanges

If you just want a checklist to follow, you can go straight to

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/ContributingChanges#Submission_checklist

If you can't run the entire testsuite for some reason (it can be
difficult on Windows), please at least run `contrib/check-code.py` on
any files you've modified and run `python contrib/check-commit` on any
commits you've made (for example, `python contrib/check-commit
273ce12ad8f1` will report some style violations on a very old commit).