Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs (was: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: John Wiegley <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2016 09:16:27 -0800
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> Given that there are active developers who appreciate and use the ChangeLog
> format, I don't think we are going to remove them just yet. Instead, the
> question has been raised as to whether we should go back to maintaining
> ChangeLog files manually, or continue to generate them from version control as
> we do now.
> 
> My vote is to continue generating from version control, and Eli would like to
> go back to direct maintenance. What do others think?

My vote is to go back to having ChangeLog files (could be a single
file, though) in the repository.  My reasons:

  . The current system is clearly not working well: the mistakes in
    the log messages are not corrected, and there's an unsolved
    problem of merging from the release branch to master.

  . Other projects maintain ChangeLog files in the repository: GCC,
    Binutils, GDB, glibc, Texinfo, XEmacs, to name just those that I
    know about.

  . We have maintained ChangeLog files in the repo for years, and I
    don't remember this ever being a problem, provided that a proper
    merge tool (git-merge-changelog for Git) is installed.