On 29 April 2011 21:21, Jim Meyering <j...@meyering.net> wrote: > Reuben Thomas wrote: >> I'm trying to prepare a small cosmetic patch to fix up a couple of >> things I find myself manually fixing up: >> >> 1. "./NEWS". I considered replacing this with the basename of the NEWS >> file, but in fact it seems to me it's better to use the literal "NEWS" >> since that makes more sense in the email. What do you think? > > Neither would work. > Using the basename wouldn't work in general, since it might be > invoked with --news=$(srcdir)/NEWS --news=$(srcdir)/sub-project/NEWS > > If you simply remove any "./" prefix, that would be great.
OK. >> 2. In the email subject, better use $package_name $curr_version than >> $my_distdir. > > All of my announcement Subjects have used $my_distdir (i.e., package-X.Y) > for years. You can see that policy reflected in README-release's > suggested "Subject: coreutils-X.Y released [stable]", too. > > Yet you prefer to use a space in place of the "-"? Yes, because the subject of an email should be human language, not computerese. I am releasing, for example, "zile 2.3.24", not "zile-2.3.24". Really, even that is not ideal. In autoconf terms, I would rather have PACKAGE_NAME VERSION (in this case, "Zile 2.3.24"). But removing the space gets almost all of the effect intended for much less effort (as PACKAGE_NAME isn't available in announce-gen, and confusingly PACKAGE is called $package_name). > This seems pretty deeply seated to me, and I'd rather not change it. Announcing things with human-readable typography rather than computer-readable typography seems deep-seated just about everywhere else I look. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org
