Comment 1 for bug 612222

I agree that we need to ensure the NEWS file is not lost and is available to users when they install a packaged version of VM.

However, not sure if <prefix>/share/emacs/etc is the correct location. Not all distros have a <prefix>/share/emacs/etc directory. Ubuntu and Debian certainly don't.

I also notice that many packages do include a NEWS file in <prefix>/share/doc/<package> i.e. /usr/share/doc/vm. This directory also often contains a distro specific README file i.e. README.debian and other related files. The debian and ubuntu packages include such directories and files.

Another problem with using <prefix>/share/emacs/etc is that I don't think many users would actually look there for documentation. Much more likely to look in /usr/share/doc/vm.

Perhaps a better approach would be to put a note in the README file asking distro package maintainers to include the NEWS file and to log bugs with distros if they forget to do this.