Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ingo Lohmar <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2016 21:22:11 +0100
> 
> In any case, I was speaking mostly hypothetically.  I am either
> interested in a high-level description of some changes that might affect
> me, or cool new things to try, in which case I look at NEWS.  Or I am
> interested in details of what a function does differently now, or a
> changed call signature or whatever --- in that case, I have never found
> the Changelog to be sufficiently detailed.  Instead I will look (on the
> next possible occasion) at the (commits that changed the) source code.

My use cases are very different, because more often than not they have
to do with fixing some more-or-less subtle bug in code written long
ago and modified many times since.  I use "git log -L" a lot (it even
ran out of memory  few times on me), but that often is not enough,
because you can see the code changes, but not many explanations why
they were made.  And since people who made those changes are generally
very bright, concluding that they just made stupid mistakes somehow
doesn't seem appropriate.

So I need every piece of evidence I can dig up, in order to figure out
the reasons for the change.  I frequently search mailing list
discussions around the dates of the changes, including mailing lists
that are now long gone, and bug reports.  An accurate log entry is
sometimes a jewel, in that it suddenly makes all the pieces to fall in
place.  A bad log entry, by contrast, is a stub in the back.