On 26 Nov 2009, at 00:50, Nicola Pero wrote:
I'd be in favour of ditching NEWS and ChangeLog.
ChangeLog has less information, in a less useful format, than the
svn logs and is a hold-over from CVS not storing repository-wide
change information sensibly. With svn log, you can get a log of
change messages at any granularity that you like.
I agree there is an overlap, but there are also some differences. ;-)
Subversion records a single log message for an entire transaction,
which might contain changes to a number of files.
A ChangeLog entry is supposed to contain a separate log message for
every file that was changed.
You realise that svn lets you commit changes to different files
separately, right? If you have independent out-of-tree changes,
commit them separately (see r29053 to r29055; three commits, all
created together but committed separately to provide different log
messages).
Finally, the obvious advantage of a ChangeLog is that every source
code distribution/tarball will include it. Subversion logs are only
available if you use subversion.
Subversion is available to anyone with access to the svn repository.
People can track it by subscribing to the RSS feed from cia.vc, they
can see an individual committer's changes by looking at the timeline
on Ohloh.net. The information is available in a form that is easy for
tools to process.
If someone wants to do 'svn log > ChangeLog' when creating the
tarballs, they can; just add it to the script you use to generate the
tarball. Given that most tarball downloads are likely to be from
people who just want to build the code, however, it seems like a waste
of space.
I still see your point - particularly for new software, written from
scratch by a single person and not yet really released, it is faster
to just code it all and write short subversion logs for each commit
- it sounds superfluous to also write ChangeLog entries. But
once the software is quite finished and stable, is widely used and
released, and we're polishing it while being extremely careful
not to break things, then a more careful approach where every change
is documented in great detail (and even redundantly) looks
good to me. ;-)
Writing a ChangeLog entry does not make you more careful, it just
makes you either write duplicate information, or split the useful
information between the ChangeLog file and the svn log.
So maybe we could adopt a different approach depending on the
project. I certainly think ChangeLogs are very good for the core
libraries.
I still haven't seen a convincing argument for it. Any of the
information that people write in the ChangeLog file they could also
write in the commit log. It is impossible to make a commit without
writing a log message, it is easy to make a commit without editing the
ChangeLog (you could add a pre-commit hook that prevented this, but no
one has done so).
David
-- Send from my Jacquard Loom
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