Re: vc-dwim and ChangeLog

[Bruno Haible]

Jim Meyering wrote:
> It's that final step, to sync from commit log to ChangeLog
> that would have to be automated,

Yes, as an everyday user of "vc-dwim --commit" I would welcome
a tooling help for "git commit --amend".

> but I keep hoping you'll agree to drop the ChangeLog.

No, for a project like gnulib, with several developers and code that can
easily break through untested commits, and where many users don't use the
release tarballs, the ChangeLog is very useful. Searching the git history
is not always easy, for example the gitweb front-end shows only one week
of changes per page [1]; it takes 5 pages to view the changes since the
last stable release. ChangeLog is everything in one piece - just handy.
And it requires no knowlegde of git to view it; it's just there as a plain
file.

But I agree that with the good commit message discipline that we have had
over the last few years and the enforced linear history (no branch merges),
"git log" is very similar to the ChangeLog contents since 2007.

Bruno

[1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=log