Release process changes and a few other things

[John Bailey]

On 06/12/2011 02:36 PM, Mark Doliner wrote:
> There are a few changes I'd like to make.  Anyone have objections or questions?
> 
> * Remove the dates from the version number lines in ChangeLog.API and
> ChangeLog.win32 (we already did this for po/ChangeLog).  The dates
> will still be listed in ChangeLog.  Listening them elsewhere seems
> redundant.

ChangeLog.win32 should not be touched at all.  It has not changed since 2.7.1
and will not change in the future.  I don't see the need to edit a file that
won't be changed anyway.

I have no objection to axing dates from ChangeLog.API.  Since it's easier, we
could just stop putting dates on new versions instead of going back and axing
all the dates.

> * Get rid of NEWS.  I don't think many people look at it, and I feel
> like it doesn't provide much value to anyone.  I think users are more
> likely to look at the 'News' section of the Pidgin website, and so I
> think we should try to use it more (although I don't think we should
> feel obligated to write a news entry for each release).  Examples of
> things that I think would be good to post on the web site: "This is
> the first release with voice and video support!"  "We officially
> promoted Leroy Jenkins from Crazy Patch Writer to Developer"  "Our
> release cycle will be a bit slower over the next few months as we work
> on larger architecture changes for Pidgin 3.0.0."

I believe 'make distcheck' will fail if we don't keep NEWS around.  We could, of
course, stop making use of it.

> * Get rid of some directories on our rpm repo.  The most recent Pidgin
> version in these repos is 2.6.8.  Also RHEL 5 has been out since March
> 2007.  CentOS 5 has been out since April 2007.  People should have
> updated by now.
> http://rpm.pidgin.im/centos/4/
> http://rpm.pidgin.im/centos/4AS/
> http://rpm.pidgin.im/centos/4ES/
> http://rpm.pidgin.im/rhel/4/
> http://rpm.pidgin.im/rhel/4AS/
> http://rpm.pidgin.im/rhel/4ES/

I agree entirely.  The dependency version changes for 2.7.x precludes building
on RHEL/CentOS 4, so there's no point in keeping anything around for it.

> * Remove http://rpm.pidgin.im/fedora/ and
> http://www.pidgin.im/download/fedora_core/.  It looks like Fedora
> keeps Pidgin fairly up to date themselves (the oldest supported
> version, Fedora 13, has Pidgin 2.7.11).

I have no preference on this one.  I don't see a problem with telling users that
they have to upgrade their distro or compile Pidgin themselves.

John

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