NEWS again (was: PHP 5.4.4RC2 Released)

On Thu, 31 May 2012 21:01:50 -0400, David Soria Parra wrote:

We would like to announce the second RC of the 5.4.4 version. This is mainly a bugfix release. The release includes a fix for a weakness crypts() DES implementation (CVE-2012-2143). Please test it and notify us of any problems you may encounter. The full list of the fixes is as always in the NEWS file.

Sorry to bring this up again, but they aren't. 5.3 NEWS are not being merged. Right now, NEWS is pretty useless. If I want to know whether some change is in one release, 5.4 NEWS won't tell me that. For instance, 0f180a63 was committed to 5.3 in April 7 (a stream_get_line() fix). It is most definitely in 5.4.4RC2: $ git merge-base 0f180a63e php-5.4.4RC2 0f180a63ebb2d65bbe49b68d2430639b20443e9a However, there's no mention in NEWS. The current policy of changing only the lowest branch NEWS obviously can only work if these changes are then merged to the most recent branches on release. If the RMs are unwilling to do such merging, we should change the policy to require updating the NEWS files in every stable branch to which the fix was merged. -- Gustavo Lopes