Present Perfect

This release has been sitting on my hard drive for the last week, waiting for me to find some time to finish it off and send it out.

I'm happy with this release because I finally got to hack on a feature that was in my sights for a while now - replacement of the prepare-ChangeLog.pl script. Not only because it is named terribly or because it is in perl, but also because I think this is a useful feature for us non-emacs users that should be correctly maintained and extended to support other VCS systems.

From the RELEASE notes:

In the days of yore, grandpa used to communicate his hacking results
to other greyed hackers using GNOME's prepare-ChangeLog.pl script.
But grandpa was a lazy typist so he named his copy cl.pl
And grandpa was a Subversion user, so he hacked in some ugly SVN support
in his copy of cl.pl.
And a friend of grandpa was a TLA user, so the friend hacked in some uglier
TLA support in their copy of cl.pl.
And grandpa was a sharer, so all grandpa's hacker friends in the old age
retirement home had a copy of cl.pl, either the one with or without TLA
support, depending on when they befriended grandpa.
And grandpa was a Perl hater, so he muttered in his beard every time he
had to look at the code.
And grandpa had Alzheimer's, so he never could remember to send patches
upstream.

But now grandpa has a grandson, who is still young and naive, and full of
energy, and he decided to carry on grandpa's work. And he implemented
moap changelog prepare, and all was well.
And he added "mcp" as an alias to "moap changelog prepare", in his .bashrc,
and "mcc" as an alias to "moap changelog checkin", and lo! did he go forth
and hack and communicate.

And the young hacker removed grandpa's old cl.pl script from his $HOME/bin
directory, printed the script, folded the papers into a bouquet of flowers
and put it on his grandfather's grave.

More info on the project page.

This release is also the first release to receive an outside patch - from none other than GStreamer's bug master, Tim Philipp-Müller. He earns eternal moap "first patch" bragging rights.

On my wish list: support for other VCS systems, and distro packagers packaging this and putting this in their distros.

This release has been sitting on my hard drive for the last week, waiting for me to find some time to finish it off and send it out. I'm happy...