On Wed, 10 Jan 2018, Richard Stallman wrote: > > I think we are going ever further into the wrong problem. My hypothesis > > is that for the vast bulk of changes, a list of changed entities is never > > going to be of use in future development > > In my personal experience, this was very useful. Your opinion will > not trump my experience.
In my personal experience, this list is never useful. The *inverse* problem often comes up - given an entity, listing the commits responsible for the present state of the code - but that's just "git blame". (That git blame won't mention commits that only deleted lines of code without adding anything is not a problem in my experience, but of course there are other interfaces such as git log -S and -G that can be used to find when something was deleted.) And if my attention has been drawn to a particular commit, "git show" to look at the diffs is sufficient for me without needing a list of entities. What are the purposes for which you find that list of entities useful? I strongly suspect it's a matter of different workflows people are used to - for any purpose for which the list is useful, there are other workflows that are just as good that do not need the list. But if it's a matter of some projects tending more to have changes for which the list of entities is useful then the standards should reflect this, so that projects for which that list is not found useful do not need to maintain it. Certainly typical changes in glibc or GCC are very different from the sort of changes for which example ChangeLog entries are given in the standards (larger, more complicated, involve more pieces that need changing together but aren't individually of particular significance). -- Joseph S. Myers [email protected]
