Proposed new workflow

The current workflow for maintaining kplatforms makefiles involves:

1. looking at sentinel sites to determine the projects that require upgrading;
2. updating the various included makefiles; and
3. reading the release notes for updated projects.

I believe we can streamline this process quite a bit.

#1 and #2 can be made easier by using a feature that I've proposed be added to Drush make: Issue #53: Allow drush make to generate compiled and/or updated makefiles The code is hosted on a dev branch of Praxis' fork of Drush: https://github.com/PraxisLabs/drush/tree/make_lock.

Essentially, that pull request allows a makefile to act more like a composer.json, and results in the equivalent of a composer.lock. So, rather than specify all versions of all projects in our makefiles, we only specify those that we want to 'pin'. We then run:

drush make --no-build --lock=d7_new.lock stubs/Drupal7_local.make

The result is a new makefile compiled from all the includes with versions specified for all projects. We can then use a simple new Drush extension, make_diff, to compare an existing lock file to the new one. This extension also allows us to pass a '--list' option that will output a simple list of the changed projects along with their versions:

$ drush diff old.lock new.lock
 Project  Old version  New version                              
 coder    2.1          2.2                                      
 devel    1.4          1.3          WARNING: version downgrade!

$ drush diff old.make new.make --list
coder-7.x-2.2 devel-7.x-1.3

To address #3, this latter output can be fed into Drush's 'release-notes' command, and piped into a file:

$ drush rln `drush diff old.make new.make --list` > relnotes.txt
$ head relnotes.txt 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 > RELEASE NOTES FOR 'CODER' PROJECT, VERSION 7.x-2.2: 
 >    Maintenance release that adds Composer support. 
 Changes since 7.x-2.1: 
 * The string data type in @param should be lower case. 
  * Improved hook implementation doc block error detection. 
  * #1519442 by TravisCarden, klausi: Add sniff for @return void. 
  * #2146275 by blauerberg, JordanDukart: Drupal Coder Review Sniffer UI fails with PHP_CodeSniffer 1.5 Release. 
  * #2159567 by Darren Oh, klausi: Private class members are allowed now and should not throw warnings. 
  * #2135201 by TravisCarden: Don't impose line length limit on @see directives.

We can then commit the compiled 'lock' makefile and release notes into kplatforms. This approach had a number of benefits:

• It is much more automated, while still maintaining a fully versioned manifest.
• We could get rid of the '_local' stubs, since we'd be building from a single makefile.
• We could #1372612: Keep a copy of makefiles when creating platforms, thus allowing us to #1372614: Include platform makefile with site backups, making backups more portable.

Eventually, this process could itself be largely automated, since it's essentially just 6 commands:

$ drush make --no-build --lock=d7_new.lock stubs/Drupal7_local.make
$ diff_list=`drush diff d7.lock d7_new.lock --list`
$ drush rln $diff_list > relnotes.txt
$ cp d7_new.lock d7.lock
$ git add d7.lock relnotes.txt
$ git commit -m"Updates to: $diff_list"