Re: Abolishing ChangeLog files

[David Engster]

Alan Mackenzie writes:
> On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 09:55:29AM +0000, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
>> David Engster <address@hidden> writes:
>> > The most time consuming thing is fixing ChangeLogs (we don't have any
>> > in CEDET and generate them from commit logs).
>
>> I would like to suggest another change - how about removing ChangeLog
>> files from the development repository.  I think these files are
>> redundant to the commit log of the vc.
>
>> Removing the files from the repository would clean diffs and reduce
>> merge conflicts.  Considering distributed vc, a project's history cannot
>> be thought of as to be list of consecutive increments.
>
>> Distributions of Emacs could include ChangeLog files generated from the
>> vc commit log, of course.
>
> Of course?  Generating the (structured) ChangeLog from (free form) log
> entrys isn't trivial.

Indeed. That's why I wrote the time consuming thing is "fixing" those
generated ChangeLogs, like

- combining changes to the same file (and maybe function) which stretch
  over several commits,

- removing further explanations which are fine in commit logs but not in
  ChangeLogs,

- putting ChangeLogs entries in the right places (I have to deal with
  five different ChangeLogs: etc/, admin/, doc/misc, lisp/, and finally
  lisp/cedet),

- and many more smaller things; sometimes commit logs just don't have
  the proper format.

Much of this stuff could be automated, though. I just didn't have time
yet to implement all this. Maybe we could work together with the Org
people on that; while we use bzr, I guess some of the code could be
shared.

-David