On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 6:47 AM Oscar Benjamin <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2022 at 04:43, Jason Moore <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > HI, > > > > I really like the bot and it forces you to at least think about the > release notes (even if all you do is write NO ENTRY). Yes, our review > culture should be that we don't let NO ENTRY through as much, but that is a > culture change. The bot could say, "are you really really sure this only > needs a no entry??" > > When exactly would the bot say that? > > The problem with the bot is that it hassles you when you first open > the PR so then you either add NO ENTRY or you add a quick release > note. That only happens at the beginning of the PR lifetime though and > then the PR can evolve significantly afterwards. It might be that at > the time you write the release note you don't yet know what the final > result of the PR will be or some of its effects are not fully > understood. It might be that you start with one approach and then > after review end up with something very different. I know at the end > that I don't click merge without going through the diff but the > release note isn't in the diff so it's a separate step that needs to > be checked. So maybe when you start a PR you add NO ENTRY just to shut > the bot up or maybe you add a release note but it isn't very good > because you're not ready to write a proper note at the time the bot > hassles you. > Ideally, when this happens you would leave the release notes empty. That way you remember to fill them in before you merge, because the release notes status will be failing. I think you're right that a lot of people do this, though. Would it help to have a separate thing you could write like "TODO" which would make the bot give a pending status? We could also make the bot skip draft PRs. Otherwise, I'm not sure what we can do to make sure people look at the notes at merge time. Maybe require some sort of affirmative review of the notes from the merger? > > To me the problem is not so much that some contributors overuse NO > ENTRY but rather that sometimes the notes are uninformative and don't > convey any useful information. This happens too, but I've definitely seen people overuse NO ENTRY as well. To the point that I've considered removing it entirely, and just living with the occasional useless "fix a typo" in the release notes. If you're only looking at the release notes document you won't see the NO ENTRYs. Maybe we can make a script that shows every NO ENTRY PR that was part of a release. > By the time it comes round to release > the idea of going through all of them and trying to make sense of them > and improve them is just too much. > This is definitely the problem that the bot was intended to solve (having to worry about the release notes at release time). Again, the idea was that reviewers would make sure the release notes look good before merging. If they aren't doing that, we need to figure out how to change that. > > I also think the release notes should be part of the repo, part of the > docs, and packaged in the released source tarball. > > One thing I like about doing it this way is that then before a release > you can open a PR to do the step of combining all of the release > notes. Then lots of people can review and comment on the notes and > make changes. Authors can be tagged and asked to clarify what they > really mean by their release note. That means we have a second stage > of release note review that focuses only on the notes themselves and > that can also look at the collection of all notes together. > > > Having the best of both worlds would be nice. I think scipy or some of > the other big python projects do things as Oscar suggests, have a single > file per PR that is merged together. > > In general I would prefer to have everything in the repo and I think > that means that the release notes have to be in the PR somehow. The > single file approach is mainly just to avoid merge conflicts. > Just to be clear, I think it is technically possible to keep the notes on the PR entry, and even on the wiki between releases, if that ends up being easier. We can copy the notes from the wiki into the docs at release time. Or we can make the bot post the notes into the repo instead of the wiki. It would also be possible to have the author write the notes in a file instead of the PR description, but continue to use the bot to check things. Or we could remove the bot and do the check on CI. All would have the same end result (the notes in the docs). So we should figure out which process is most convenient for contributors and for reviewers and aim for that. Aaron Meurer > -- > Oscar > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sympy" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAHVvXxSVQfXTL9x%2BBYnCRtcxZVhq8sCYH_ojKNWfQhovm0zBUg%40mail.gmail.com > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAKgW%3D6LC%2BR9ugMYBYc_YmK5%2Bc3bVpA8u3_7xSSTPMTZi6usGQw%40mail.gmail.com.
