[Bioc-devel] All Package Maintainers Please README!

[James W. MacDonald]

Robert recently suggested that I make a stab at a blog-based changelog 
rather than the current monthly postings, sort of similar to what Duncan 
Murdoch has done with the R NEWS and windows CHANGELOG.

The biggest difference between what is done for R and what I will be 
doing for BioC is this; R-core does a really good job of writing 
explanatory notes describing what the change was, and what it means for 
the end user.

On the other hand, the commit messages that people use range from the 
ridiculous to the sublime. Since I will no longer be parsing the commit 
messages by hand, I will not be able to remove the more useless messages 
that people tend to use, and these things will go straight to the 
changelog for all to see.

So, first thing; if you don't want your section of the changelog to be 
populated with things like 'WTF was I thinking?!@!?@!?' or 'Oops', or 
the venerable 'commit' or better yet, the ever popular ' ', you will 
want to actually use a commit message that means something with respect 
to the commit you just made.

Now I know some of the commit messages are not intended for public 
consumption, so there is a way out. If you prepend your commit message 
with INTERNAL, then it will be scrubbed. Or at least I think it will 
;-D. I'm using Python for the first time to do the parsing, so I am sure 
there are bugs aplenty. Note that this INTERNAL thing is _by line_, so 
if you do something like:

INTERNAL This is a commit message nobody should ever see.

But they can see this one.

Then the second part of the message _should_ get through. Note that you 
need to use INTERNAL exactly, as it is always possible that someone 
might use Internal at the beginning of a commit message that they want 
published, so I am not doing any case-changing on the test for this string.

The changelog as it currently exists (with just one day of changes so 
far) can be viewed here:

http://fgc.lsi.umich.edu/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi

Please take a look and send me any suggestions.

Best,

Jim



-- 
James W. MacDonald, M.S.
Biostatistician
Affymetrix and cDNA Microarray Core
University of Michigan Cancer Center
1500 E. Medical Center Drive
7410 CCGC
Ann Arbor MI 48109
734-647-5623