[Hackage] #244: Add Changelog summary feature to sdist

[Hackage]

#244: Add Changelog summary feature to sdist
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
  Reporter:  guest          |        Owner:         
      Type:  enhancement    |       Status:  new    
  Priority:  low            |    Milestone:         
 Component:  Cabal library  |      Version:  1.2.3.0
  Severity:  normal         |     Keywords:         
Difficulty:  normal         |   Ghcversion:  6.8.2  
  Platform:                 |  
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
 In a discussion with Audrey Tang, she mentioned that a very nice feature
 of CPAN which she missed in Hackage was standardized changes files.

 It seems to me that one way to acheive this would be to add a --changelog
 flag to sdist (or maybe make default). This call 'darcs changes' and copy
 into the ChangeLog everything up to 2 tags ago. (2 tags because the first
 tag might be you preparing for a release). I'd imagine parsing would be
 dead easy: 'lines' to split it up into individual entries, and then take
 until you hit a 'tagged' entry. If the resulting list is length of 1, then
 take again.

 So you'd go 'runhaskell Setup sdist --changelog', and ChangeLog in the
 tarball would have, say, for Monadius:

 ----
 Wed Feb 20 18:37:42 EST 2008  gwern0 at gmail.com
  tagged 0.91

 Wed Feb 20 18:37:29 EST 2008  gwern0 at gmail.com
  * misc improvements: newtype, cabal, fmt

 Fri Dec  7 16:23:53 EST 2007  gwern0 at gmail.com
  * rm extra source-files
  The line was originally there because there is an icon for Monadius in
 the source-files and some sort of Windows resource text file telling
 Windows to use it; I'm removing the mention of them in the .cabal because
 I don't think Cabal handles that right now.

 Thu Dec  6 16:30:31 EST 2007  gwern0 at gmail.com
  * whitespace changes, add haskell98 to dependencies

 Tue Dec  4 13:46:38 EST 2007  gwern0 at gmail.com
  * mv cabal field so hackage doesn't complain

 Tue Dec  4 13:10:47 EST 2007  gwern0 at gmail.com
  * cabal fixes

 Tue Dec  4 08:32:25 EST 2007  gwern0 at gmail.com
  tagged 0.91
 ----

 At this point, Hackage could be updated to link to it in the same way as
 it does for the .cabal file. That way, people could then easily take a
 look and see what's new since the last version. (Said facility is
 currently a little difficult unless the package authors manually maintain
 a ChangeLog and specifically include it into the tarball; you'd still have
 to either go to the repo or download the tarball simply to find out what's
 different from the older packages.)

 --gwern

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/244>
Hackage <http://haskell.org/cabal/>
Hackage: Cabal and related projects