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Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful
From: |
Joseph Myers |
Subject: |
Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful |
Date: |
Fri, 4 Aug 2017 17:13:16 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Alpine 2.20 (DEB 67 2015-01-07) |
On Fri, 4 Aug 2017, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> No, we should expect people to learn whatever tools are appropriate for
> working on the projects they are developing. It's not the place of the
> GNU Coding Standards to tell people how to extract particular information
> from version control history. And I'd expect most git guides to
> concentrate on things such as git bisect, because I'd expect "find the
> revision that introduced a bug" to be a more common issue than "find all
> changes affecting a symbol called X, across all source files".
>
> We cannot expect people to learn a multitude of different tools, or
> tools that have vanished from history. The above commands might not
I don't think learning the tools used by a project for version control is
significantly different from needing to know the languages it's written
in, or used to be written in, or the tools used in its build process, or
formerly so used. We might recommend a handful of commonly used version
control systems, just like a few languages are recommended. And version
control history can be converted automatically much better than e.g.
source languages.
> When a git repo grows extraordinarily large the recommended action is
> to nuke it, and start over. This looses _all_ history, meta-data, and
That is very definitely not recommended and we should not point to any
such bad recommendations. As I've said, it would be reasonable to put a
requirement to convert history if changing VCS and using version control
log messages (describing changes logically at the changeset level instead
of split by files and entities therein) instead of ChangeLog format.
The point where conversions can be tricky and lose information is very
specifically converting from a non-changeset based system such as CVS to a
changeset-based system, where heuristics need to be used to group changes
to different files that should go in a single commit. Once in a
changeset-based system, conversions are essentially lossless, with only
odd details such as subsecond timestamps being potentially lost if one
system supports them and other doesn't, not the basic structure into
commits and log messages and authors thereof.
As far as I know, all distributed VCSes are also changeset-based, but we
could put being changeset-based in the requirements for using version
control log messages at changeset level in place of ChangeLog format.
--
Joseph S. Myers
address@hidden
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, (continued)
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Giuseppe Scrivano, 2017/08/04
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Alfred M. Szmidt, 2017/08/04
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Giuseppe Scrivano, 2017/08/04
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Joseph Myers, 2017/08/04
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Ludovic Courtès, 2017/08/04
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Joseph Myers, 2017/08/04
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Ludovic Courtès, 2017/08/05
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Joseph Myers, 2017/08/04
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Alfred M. Szmidt, 2017/08/06
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Joseph Myers, 2017/08/07
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful,
Joseph Myers <=
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Karl Berry, 2017/08/04
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, John Darrington, 2017/08/05
- Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful, Joseph Myers, 2017/08/07