On Sat, 2007-12-15 at 20:54 -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote: > On Dec 3, 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Richard Kenner) wrote: > > > In my view, ChangeLog is mostly "write-only" from a developer's > > perspective. It's a document that the GNU project requires us to > produce > > for > > ... a good example of compliance with the GPL: > > 5. Conveying Modified Source Versions. > > a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified > it, and giving a relevant date. >
(Minor quibble) As copyright owner of GCC, the FSF is not bound by the conditions of the licence it grants in the same way as licencees are bound. So I don't think this provision in itself would mandate that those who have copyright assignments to the FSF record their changes. I don't hear anyone arguing that people should not record what they changes and when. The question is whether it is sufficient. I just started using git locally, and I keep thinking it would be really great to have something like "git blame" for gcc. The command "git blame" gives you a listing of who changed each line of the file and when, and also gives the commit id. From that all can be revealed. > > FWIW, I've used ChangeLogs to find problems a number of times in my 14 > years of work in GCC, and I find them very useful. When I need more > details, web-searching for the author of the patch and some relevant > keywords in the ChangeLog will often point at the relevant e-mail, so > burdening people with adding a direct URL seems pointless to me. It's > pessimizing the common case for a small optimization in far less > common cases. > This may possibly work when the mailing list entries exist and are accessible. However they are only available AFAIK from 1998. GCC has been going for 2-3 times as long as that. And there is at least one significant gap: February 2004 up to and including this message http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2004-02/msg02288.html. In my experience, when documentation is not stored with the source code, it often gets lost. When a person is offline the mailing list htmls are not available. I have an idea to resolve this that I am working on... more in due course if it comes to anything. Tim Josling