Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?

[Nikolaus Rath]

On Mar 07 2016, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:
>> When I submitted my first Emacs patch, I was astonished when I was asked
>> to re-submit with my commit message essentially duplicated in the
>> ChangeLog.
>
> I can't remember ever asking this kind of duplication.  We used to
> duplicate the ChangeLog-info in the ChangeLog file and in the commit
> message (tho we stopped doing it a year ago), but we never asked for it
> to be duplicated in the email messages that submits a patch.
>
> So I have the impression that I'm misunderstanding you.  Could you
> describe more precisely the kind of duplication you're talking about?

No, you understood me correctly. However, I've just looked this up again
and it turns out I was actually submitting a patch to Gnus, not
Emacs. It was eventually committed by Eric Abrahamsen to the Gnus git
repo, who first asked me to re-submit my patch with a commit message
that was formatted like a Changelog entry, and to duplicate the message
in the ChangeLog itself. It seemed to me that he considered that a
questionable practice himself, but said it was obligatory because Gnus
closely followed the Emacs standards here.


Unfortunately that discussion never made it into the bug
(http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20956), so I'm
paraphrasing from memory. But I'm pretty sure I'm remembering correctly,
because I was so surprised by this.


Best,
-Nikolaus

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