1.7 KiB
Conflict-free release note entries for GitHub pull requests
GitHub PR #628
This release replaces the developer-edited documentation/RELEASE_NOTES.md
source file in the EPICS tree with a process which generates that file from a
series of individual files added for each changeset in the release, thus
preventing merge conflicts when entries are added by many different pull
requests.
For this new approach each pull request must add its own Markdown file to the
documentation/new-notes directory, using a unique filename.
When a release is made, all these files will be combined into a single
RELEASE-<version>.md file and the new-notes directory emptied to prepare
for development of the next release.
Developers can generate the RELEASE_NOTES.md file by running make in the
documentation directory, which will install the result in the doc top-level
directory along with the RELEASE-<version>.md files describing older EPICS
releases going back to 3.15.
The documentation/Makefile provides some other targets which can also be
requested, but they require additional non-EPICS software such as Doxygen and
Sphinx to have been installed first.
Between releases the generated RELEASE_NOTES.md file contains the text from
any new-notes files added to document changes already merged.
It also provides links to the older RELEASE-<version>.md files, so it remains
the starting point for documentation on all release changes.
Detailed instructions on creating new entries are provided in a README.txt
file in the documentation/new-notes directory.
The release-time process that generates a new RELEASE-<version>.md file is
described in the documentation/ReleaseChecklist.html file.