Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?

[John Wiegley]

Hi Ted,

I may be a strange one here, but I like the ChangeLog format for commit
messages. It's not unreasonable to ask a submitter to take some care and pride
in their description of the changes they've made -- after all, they've spent a
fair bit of time preparing the change itself.

A little discipline never hurt anyone, and pays dividends in the long run by
making commit messages easier to scan through and read for us. Even if we
didn't have the ChangeLog format, I'm sure we'd want *some* kind of consistent
uniformity, so why not settle on the one we've had for decades?

I've always been against the ChangeLog file, but we've moved past that, even
if there are still some technical challenges to resolve.

If writing a ChangeLog entry to describe a change increases the time spent
crafting a patch by 10%, and if this loses a contributor who would have
otherwise sent us code, I'm forced to wonder in what other ways have they've
been hasty, such that working on the commit message was too much for them.

-- 
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2

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