[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs |
Date: |
Mon, 7 Mar 2016 11:02:02 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.6.0 |
Let's not go back. Maintaining ChangeLog files by hand with each commit
makes it harder to merge changes due to the inevitable collisions with
ChangeLog files. Although other projects that continue to use this older
style (e.g., glibc) work around the problem by requiring contributors to
deal with the hassles, this is one more barrier to contributions and
there are better alternatives.
On 03/07/2016 09:50 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
mistakes in the log messages are not corrected
This is a problem regardless of whether ChangeLog files are updated by
each commit. Under either approach, contributors often make mistakes in
their ChangeLog entries, and don't bother to fix them because (let's
face it) ChangeLog entries are low priority.
there's an unsolved problem of merging from the release branch to master.
We can solve that problem. (It hasn't been high priority to fix.)
Here's one simple way to fix it: run the automated ChangeLog generator
only on the master branch, as was originally intended, and use manual
updates to ChangeLog files in other branches. (The hassle of manually
maintaining ChangeLog files on emacs-25 will serve to discourage further
changes to the emacs-25 branch, which is arguably a good thing. :-) We
can come up with a better approach later.
Other projects maintain ChangeLog files in the repository: GCC,
Binutils, GDB, glibc, Texinfo, XEmacs, to name just those that I know
about.
These are all longstanding projects that haven't changed their
procedures for ages. New projects don't do this, by and large. (XEmacs
has gone quiescent, as I understand it, so it's not a good example here.)
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.
I often ran into problems. Yes, git-merge-changelog should reduce the
number of merge conflicts, but it doesn't eliminate them, and things can
be even more confusing when there are conflicts anyway. Also, requiring
git-merge-changelog means that many contributors would have to worry
about installing and configuring git-merge-changelog, which would be
more of a hassle for recruiting contributors. In practice under the old
approach many contributors didn't bother, dealt with the merge conflicts
by hand, and all too often messed up.
I should mention that git-merge-changelog effectively has no maintainer
now; if we run into a problem with it, we'll have to maintain it ourselves.
- Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?, (continued)
- Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?, Mathieu Lirzin, 2016/03/06
- Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?, Eric S. Raymond, 2016/03/06
- Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?, Eli Zaretskii, 2016/03/07
- Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?, John Wiegley, 2016/03/07
- Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?, Eli Zaretskii, 2016/03/07
- Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs (was: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?), John Wiegley, 2016/03/07
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Karl Fogel, 2016/03/07
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs (was: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?), Eli Zaretskii, 2016/03/07
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs,
Paul Eggert <=
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Eli Zaretskii, 2016/03/07
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Dmitry Gutov, 2016/03/07
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Eli Zaretskii, 2016/03/08
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Stefan Monnier, 2016/03/08
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Eli Zaretskii, 2016/03/08
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Paul Eggert, 2016/03/08
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Eli Zaretskii, 2016/03/08
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Paul Eggert, 2016/03/08
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Eli Zaretskii, 2016/03/08
- Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs, Dmitry Gutov, 2016/03/08