Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2016 10:55:39 -0800
> 
> On 03/09/2016 10:01 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Who needs a history record one cannot trust?  It's worse than having
> > no record at all.
> 
> Any historian will tell you that you cannot trust historical records. 
> Caesar's commentaries, Churchill's speeches, the Open Group Rationale, 
> Emacs ChangeLog entries -- they're all riddled with errors, and 
> sometimes have outright fabrications, and anybody studying them must 
> take this into account. That's just life.

If I wanted to be a historian, I wouldn't be here.  This community is
about software development, not about historical research.  When I'm
looking up a commit, I want accurate information about it.  I don't
want to embark on a history research project to find out which words
are truthful and which are a lie.

IOW, this analogy is not helpful, and I suspect you know that.

> There is a reasonable question about how much of our development effort 
> should be devoted to sprucing up ChangeLogs after they're committed. I 
> think this should be low priority, whereas as I understand it you would 
> prefer that we boost its priority. Neither side is advocating 
> untrustworthy ChangeLogs, or perfect ChangeLogs for that matter; it's 
> mainly a question of where to allocate our scarce development resources.

I'm arguing that we shouldn't _need_ to allocate resources to it.
Reinstating ChangeLog files solves that with minimal costs, and its
only disadvantage seems to be that it sounds "regression" to some.