Hi Glen,
thanks for pointing out - I'm old-fashioned and magnetic tapes were
highly fashionable and punch cards still in use when I started coding
... :-).
Going back to the discussion - let's avoid mixing up intention and
tools. My intention is visibility of a casual committer who only adds
one or two bug fixes and I have the habit of honoring this small
contribution in changes.xml since it becomes part of the site. I don't
care how it's done ... ;-)
Cheers,
Siegfried Goeschl
Senile Software Engineer
On 29.01.13 03:10, Glen Mazza wrote:
Oh--I haven't been bumping up the org.apache.wiki.Release number because
I was unaware that we needed to do that (Sorry, wasn't paying
attention--I always wondered where that "2.9.1-svn-XX" value came from
in the ChangeLog file... :) Now if I understand correctly, I *don't*
need to bump up that number and update the ChangeLog file with trivial
commits such as typos being fixed or should I be doing that for every
commit? I'm flexible here--I just need to know what to do. (Once we
Mavenize, incidentally, the manual incrementing numbering system might
no longer be needed because somehow the Jenkins/Maven combination
automatically generates snapshot bundles every day with something like a
YYYYMMDDHH24MISS format appended to the name of the generated
JARs/WARs.--I'm unsure here though.)
Earlier today I asked two of my coworkers, Dan Kulp and Olivier Lamy,
who are each committers on approximately 10 Apache projects each
(http://people.apache.org/committer-index.html , users dkulp and olamy),
how many of their projects use manually updated change files -- Dan
reported zero and Olivier just one (Apache Commons, as Siegfried noted
earlier). So that's why I'm unaccustomed to maintaining such a
file--I've never needed it and have never heard of people on these
projects complaining about the lack of such a file. (Incidentally, if
we want to highlight contributors without a change file, we can always
add them manually to our web site page, like Apache Camel does here:
http://camel.apache.org/team.html ) .
One small concern to keep in mind about manually maintaining a change
log, is that it may give an "old fashioned" image to the project,
because such files were much more common 10-15 years ago before we had
modern repository systems. To the point that sleekness, coolness and
modernity in a code base drive adoption (and more committers :),
maintaining a change log file might be furthering an older image harming
that goal. (It would be perhaps akin to a teenage rockstar offering his
music additionally on cassette and phonograph records, or Apple selling
its MacBook Pro laptops with a 3 1/2-inch diskette drive slot. In both
cases, you're harming the image of sleekness/modernity that drives a
portion of sales.) Just food for thought!
Regards,
Glen
PS: Oh, to answer your question, sure, we can switch to an mdtext format
as you propose; or switch our website to Commons Email style and just
have it use the changes.xml directly (although I kind of like the softer
format of our website compared to theirs -- especially since our website
already looks much like JSPWiki :)
On 01/28/2013 03:00 PM, Juan Pablo Santos RodrÃguez wrote:
Hi,
the ChangeLog shows the lists of "versions", being a "version" something
similar to a (i.e.) Jenkins release (except that in Jenkins new release =
new war), that is, a bunch of new functionality, which may comprise
one or
several commits. In the latter case, the Changelog file comes in handy.
If a new functionality is added, the release number in
org.apache.wiki.Release gets bumped and the ChangeLog file is updated
with
the appropiate info. Similarly a commit may not be itself worth a
"version", i.e.: a commit to omit some auto-generated files. What
constitutes a "version" and what not is left to the committer; as they're
cheap to generate it isn't a big deal.
Related to ChangeLog, and having mentioned Jenkins, I've just noticed
that
the ChangeLog file is very close to Markdown syntax, so we could use
it to
generate a $svn/site/trunk/content/jspwiki/development/changelog.mdtext
That would make the contributors' names a lot more visible.
A first step would have some kind of JUnit (or whatever), similar to
TranslationsCheck, to generate the appropiate file. Then this change
would
also be committed and then published (this could be done automatically
by a
Jenkins post-job @ builds.a.o). Hmmm and we could also refresh the
version
displayed @ i.a.o/jspwiki, and also publish another page with the
different
translation statuses..
thoughts?
br,
juan pablo
On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 3:16 AM, Ichiro Furusato
<[email protected]>wrote:
[-1]
I'm not a committer so I don't get a vote, but FWIW I've always
preferred
human-managed change logs, since that means a human being is
highlighting
the more important changes, new or changed APIs, features, etc. whereas
the machine-generated ones force me to slog through *all* of the
changes.
Yes, it does require some overhead but it's very helpful for
co-developers.
Ichiro
On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 11:55 PM, Harry Metske <[email protected]>
wrote:
-0.5
I have always found this Changelog a very convenient mechanism of
searching
for "what has changed when in what version".
You have it one file, easily searchable and scrollable.
The overhead is minimal, always cut/paste the Changelog update to the
commit log.
I agree that mentioned links provide all information (and more), but
not
so
easy to search, you always have to click a hundred times before you
find
what you want.
kind regards,
Harry
On 25 January 2013 03:29, Glen Mazza <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi team, we have a "ChangeLog" file in the root folder that is
apparently
(?) updated whenever someone makes a commit. I don't see a need
for it,
and none of the other Apache projects I'm aware of bothers with such a
file
-- it's annoying needing to update it and it just seems to be
unnecessary
overhead. Can we get rid of it?
So long as you make comments when you commit, here is a 100.0%
authoritative and chronological list of all commits made and what they
involve:
http://mail-archives.apache.**org/mod_mbox/incubator-**
jspwiki-commits/201301.mbox/**browser<
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-jspwiki-commits/201301.mbox/browser
And of course the SVN repository details the changes made to each
specific
file fully and accurately:
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/**incubator/jspwiki/trunk/src/**
webdocs/Error.jsp?view=log<
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/jspwiki/trunk/src/webdocs/Error.jsp?view=log
Finally, JIRA nicely provides us a list of commits per release:
https://issues.apache.org/**jira/browse/JSPWIKI#**
selectedTab=com.atlassian.**jira.plugin.system.project%**3Achangelog-panel<
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JSPWIKI#selectedTab=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project%3Achangelog-panel
That should be good enough for us. WDYT?
Regards,
Glen
