Re: Auto-Generating ChangeLog and AUTHORS for projects in a version tracking system?

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

On 30 October 2014 06:45, Arne Babenhauserheide (IMK)
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Am 30.10.2014 00:43, schrieb Diego Elio Pettenò:
> I don’t want to change the GNU style. I want to have an easier way to
> *adhere to* the existing GNU style by providing default tool support for
> creating the ChangeLog and AUTHORS file from versiontracking systems.

Great. But people don't *want* to adhere to the GNU style, most people
just end up creating 0-sized AUTHORS NEWS and ChangeLog files, because
otherwise automake fails, and then they complain about autotools being
messy and requiring useless boilerplate.

> Additional motivation for this: If I want to teach someone to switch
> from a simple Makefile to autotools, I have to talk about

https://autotools.io/whosafraid.html

For 90% of the non-library projects out there this will cover enough
that is needed to start.

> As you can see, how to write a conforming ChangeLog takes roughly as
> much explanation as writing the configure.ac. And every new contributor
> will have to learn how to do that (while the other topics are only
> needed for the initial setup or for the maintainer).

So here is the usual disagreement. I don't like GNU style and I think
that imposing it and wasting people's time on it is not worth it at
all. Again I don't have stakes on the gnu style because I don't use
it. I don't want to use it. And I don't want to force anybody else to
use it. I usually make people happy when I tell them you can use
automake in foreign mode because then there is no 0-sized top-level
file there just to make it happy.


Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
address@hidden — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/