DEV: reduce merge conflicts by sorting whatsnew notes by issue number?

[MarcoGorelli]

• closes DEV: reduce merge conflicts by sorting whatsnew notes by issue number? #51712 (Replace xxxx with the GitHub issue number)
• Tests added and passed if fixing a bug or adding a new feature
• All code checks passed.
• Added type annotations to new arguments/methods/functions.
• Added an entry in the latest doc/source/whatsnew/vX.X.X.rst file if fixing a bug or adding a new feature.

The script which does this is scripts/sort_whatsnew_note.py. There's a defensive check inside to validate that it has only reordered the lines of a file, and hasn't changed anything else

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Rather than tagging all of core/triage, I've just request a review from whoever participated in #50275 - but if this proves controversial we can tag the rest

[jbrockmendel]

Implementation seems fine, im going to post general thoughts in #51712

[bashtage]

Agree implementation looks fine, would be good to see if could be automated as part of the test suite. Could you add that so one could check the before and after whatsnew file for differences?

[MarcoGorelli]

yup, done - have run it over all files, you can check what it changes

[bashtage]

This feels like a real win to me for reducing whatsnew conflicts.

[Dr-Irv]

I like this idea, but I wonder if we should just do this for whatsnew notes starting with 2.0 and not change the ordering for old whatsnew notes

Also, going forward, if someone does a PR and updates the whatsnew of the latest version, is there something we can do to automate the sorting as part of either pre-commit or CI?

[WillAyd]

Nice idea

[MarcoGorelli]

Thanks!

Also, going forward, if someone does a PR and updates the whatsnew of the latest version, is there something we can do to automate the sorting as part of either pre-commit or CI?

Yup, it's in pre-commit

[bashtage]

One more - does this run in CI and will CI fail if this returns non-zero?

[MarcoGorelli]

That's right! You can see it here: https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/actions/runs/4312190011/jobs/7522443368

 sort whatsnew entries by issue number...................................................................Passed
- hook id: sort-whatsnew-items
- duration: 0.05s

And yes, it'll return non-zero exit code if it would've modified any file (like all pre-commit hooks)

[bashtage]

LGTM and a no regret way to reduce merge conflicts.

[Dr-Irv]

LGTM

[MarcoGorelli]

I've amended this to exclude 2.0.0, so it'll only be applied going forwards

If in 3.0.0 we want to keep some parts of a section grouped, we can just make subsections, e.g.

Removal of prior version deprecations/changes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Non-keyword arguments
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
- Disallow passing non-keyword arguments to :func:`read_excel` except ``io`` and ``sheet_name`` (:issue:`34418`)
- Disallow passing non-keyword arguments to :meth:`DataFrame.drop` and :meth:`Series.drop` except ``labels`` (:issue:`41486`)

Behavior changes
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
- Changed behavior of :meth:`Series.quantile` and :meth:`DataFrame.quantile` with :class:`SparseDtype` to retain sparse dtype (:issue:`49583`)

[WillAyd]

Thanks @MarcoGorelli