Re: Auto-Generating ChangeLog and AUTHORS for projects in a version tracking system?

[Diego Elio Pettenò]

Can't we just say that gnu-flavour automake is pointless and foreign should
be the default? Or am I too opinionated on that?

Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
address@hidden — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

On 29 October 2014 15:27, Arne Babenhauserheide (IMK) <
address@hidden> wrote:

> Dear GNU Hackers,
>
>
> In quite a few guides I saw people suggest using the foreign automake
> style to avoid having to create the required text files.
>
> The goal of this email is to get more people to use the GNU style, so
> the interface for understanding an autotools project becomes more
> consistent again: GNU style should become standard for all guides.
>
>
> Among the required files, NEWS is easy to create but cannot be guessed
> automatically because it is intended for humans, and README is becoming
> standard (again) due to most code hosting sites using it as the summary
> page. AUTHORS and ChangeLog normally only contain information which
> already available in most version tracking systems - and can be created
> easily from that.
>
> If autotools did this automatically, the barrier for using GNU style in
> the autotools with a version tracking system would be much smaller: Just
> write README and NEWS.
>
>
> I initially planned to just send a small example script, but that
> matured faster than I had expected, so you can now find it at
>
>
>
> https://bitbucket.org/ArneBab/autochangelog/src/tip/create-or-update-changelog-and-authors.sh
>
> If someone with git-foo could cleanup the git ChangeLog creation to
> conform with the GNU ChangeLog standard, that script should be a good
> working example.
>
> The script only touches files which were created by the script or are
> missing.
>
>
> Best wishes,
> Arne
>
> PS: I initially sent this mail to the autoconf list. The original
> discussion is at [1] and includes the gnulib script which roughly does
> for git what I propose here. Doing this in automake would have the
> advantage that all users benefit from the lower barrier of entry to the
> consistent GNU style.
>
> [1]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2014-10/msg00000.html
>
> --
> Doktorand
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>
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>
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>
>