bug#37260: 26.3; Emacs 26.3 NEWS

bug#37260: 26.3; Emacs 26.3 NEWS

[Drew Adams]

NEWS for Emacs 26.3 looks quite empty.  I don't think I've ever
seen this kind of NEWS for a release before, but perhaps I just
haven't noticed it.

There are 8 empty sections (just titles, no content), and only one
non-empty section, which has only this:

 * Changes in Emacs 26.3

 ** New option 'help-enable-completion-auto-load'.
 This allows disabling the new feature introduced in Emacs 26.1 which
 loads files during completion of 'C-h f' and 'C-h v' according to
 'definition-prefixes'.

 ** Emacs now supports the new Japanese Era name.
 The newly assigned codepoint U+32FF was added to the Unicode Character
 Database compiled into Emacs.

1. Is this correct, or is something missing?  If correct, shouldn't
there perhaps be some indication of _why_ a new release was created just
for those two changes?  On the face of it, they don't seem very
consequential.  Is there something more to it than what there appears to
be?

2. Is it normal that we have empty sections?  Shouldn't we explicitly
note that there are no changes of each of those kinds?  E.g., why have
an empty section for "Installation Changes in Emacs 26.3, if there are
none?  Or why not have the section, but with some content (e.g. "None.")
that indicates that there are no installation changes?


In GNU Emacs 26.3 (build 1, x86_64-w64-mingw32)
 of 2019-08-29
Repository revision: 96dd0196c28bc36779584e47fffcca433c9309cd
Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 10.0.17763
Configured using:
 `configure --without-dbus --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32
 --without-compress-install 'CFLAGS=-O2 -static -g3''

bug#37260: 26.3; Emacs 26.3 NEWS

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2019 11:25:24 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>
> 
> NEWS for Emacs 26.3 looks quite empty.  I don't think I've ever
> seen this kind of NEWS for a release before, but perhaps I just
> haven't noticed it.

It's a bugfix release, so ideally there should be no NEWS-worthy
changes at all.

> There are 8 empty sections (just titles, no content), and only one
> non-empty section, which has only this:
> 
>  * Changes in Emacs 26.3
> 
>  ** New option 'help-enable-completion-auto-load'.
>  This allows disabling the new feature introduced in Emacs 26.1 which
>  loads files during completion of 'C-h f' and 'C-h v' according to
>  'definition-prefixes'.
> 
>  ** Emacs now supports the new Japanese Era name.
>  The newly assigned codepoint U+32FF was added to the Unicode Character
>  Database compiled into Emacs.
> 
> 1. Is this correct, or is something missing?

Nothing's missing, AFAIK.

> 2. Is it normal that we have empty sections?

It's an artifact of converting an RC (where empty sections are
acceptable) to a release (where they shouldn't be).

bug#37260: 26.3; Emacs 26.3 NEWS

[Nicolas Petton]

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Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> 2. Is it normal that we have empty sections?
>
> It's an artifact of converting an RC (where empty sections are
> acceptable) to a release (where they shouldn't be).

Maybe next time we make a tarball for a RC of a bugfix release, we
should remove all empty sections (thus only allow empty sections in
pretest tarballs).

Cheers,
Nico

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bug#37260: 26.3; Emacs 26.3 NEWS

[Glenn Morris]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> It's an artifact of converting an RC (where empty sections are
> acceptable) to a release (where they shouldn't be).

An RC is supposed to be literally identical to a release.

Anyway, it had already been fixed in the repository.