Re: ChangeLogs

[Rik]

Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 2:07 AM, Rik <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> What happened to the plan (or was it a plan already?) to move the ChangeLog
>>> entries into the mercurial commit messages?
>> This seems like a very good idea.
> 
> Well, as has been pointed out previously, it has some negative
> effects. In particular we'd lose the advantage of having the related
> changelogs grouped per directory.

I think an important question to consider is how coders will interact with
the code base.  If a bug comes up in a script .m file I imagine a debug
flow that looks like this.  I would start by going to the scripts/ChangeLog
file, searching there for every occurrence of the script file name in
question, examining the log note and deciding whether I think it is
related, and then taking action.  If all of the changes were in a single
ChangeLog this wouldn't affect the workflow, only the regular expression
used to search for the file name.

If I were working in a purely Mercurial flow I would just find the file in
the source tree and run 'hg log suspected_file.m' to see the changes.

I'm wary of the ChangeLogs because they require human intervention.  What
if someone forgets to mention a file they changed?  The debug search above
would fail.  On the other hand, Mercurial knows definitively which files
were changed.

As an aside, if per-directory ChangeLogs are a requirement then it would be
a trivial Perl script to parse the output of 'hg log --stytle changelog'
and group the changes based on directory.

> 
> I made the following modification to my Mercurial to combat this
> problem (may require a trivial merge in the import section if the
> parent is outdated):
This looks like a nice addition.  I would still prefer to run a vanilla
Mercurial and make the ChangeLogs derived files from the Mercurial logs.
But, if we don't go that direction I will definitely be patching my local
sources with this.

--Rik