Hi Flameeyes,
Am 30.10.2014 00:43, schrieb Diego Elio Pettenò: > All good and well, but then I may have misunderstood Arne's original > point. If he's trying to get the GNU style to be "good enough" That means I did not make my point clear enough. Second try: I don’t want to change the GNU style. I want to have an easier way to *adhere to* the existing GNU style by providing default tool support for creating the ChangeLog and AUTHORS file from versiontracking systems. Having NEWS, README, ChangeLog and AUTHORS in a release tarball makes a lot of sense, and having NEWS and README also makes a lot of sense in a version tracking system (I see that every time I try to use a project which does not have them). It’s just that when using a version tracking system, the ChangeLog and AUTHORS file mostly duplicate information which is already in the version tracking system. This isn’t true for all projects. With complicated history a generated ChangeLog can become useless and when committing patches from others and forgetting to change the user, an autogenerated AUTHORS file can simply be wrong. But for most projects they should be valid. Additional motivation for this: If I want to teach someone to switch from a simple Makefile to autotools, I have to talk about - configure.ac (this is mostly copy-paste, adjusting name and version) - Makefile.am (copy-paste from a similar project or adapt a Makefile) - autoreconf -i; ./configure; make (“copy this into the README”) - NEWS (“put the newest version at the top”) - README (“describe how to use the project and how to contribute”) - AUTHORS (“name all people who contributed”) - ChangeLog (describe the changes in GNU style. This means: - first line: date and author: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Style-of-Change-Logs.html - changes indented. - Start each changed file with a star (* file). - optionally name the function. - (a few special cases). - Description after a colon and in following lines, also indented. - empty line between independent changes? As you can see, how to write a conforming ChangeLog takes roughly as much explanation as writing the configure.ac. And every new contributor will have to learn how to do that (while the other topics are only needed for the initial setup or for the maintainer). Best wishes, Arne PS: I consider make distcheck as the gold standard for distributing projects. I did not yet find a tool which gets close to matching that. -- Doktorand Gruppe: GHG Raum: 435/410 Tel.: +49 721 608-22885 arne.babenhauserhe...@kit.edu Karlsruher Institut für Technologie IMK-ASF Postfach 36 40 76021 Karlsruhe
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