Re: Generating the ChangeLog files from the commit messages

[David Engster]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
>> From: David Engster <address@hidden>
>> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
>> Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 17:19:30 +0100
>> 
>> Just go through the log and in your mind strip all the generated
>> stuff (like filenames and affected symbols), and see what
>> information provided by the *author* actually remains - it's usually
>> very little, and often stating the obvious, instead of saying *why*
>> something was done.
>
> That's not what ChangeLog is supposed to tell.

We're in violent agreement here.

>> This makes our commit logs mostly useless for actually understanding how
>> code evolved.
>
> It's not intended for that.  The 'annotate' commands are for that.

Yes. As I've written: we should improve the output of 'l' in an
annotated file from the Emacs repo: commit logs should tell why
something was done.

Anyway, I'm repeating myself, let's just disagree and drop this. It's
not like this is gonna change anytime soon.

-David