Re: ChangeLog entry complexity

[David Miller <davem at davemloft dot net>]

From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@redhat.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:55:46 -0400

> Does anyone feel strongly that detailed change logs are limiting our
> acceptance of new developers to the community?

Let's take a real simple example.

I figure out that internal function FOO no longer uses argument X,
so I'm going to remove argument X from the interface.

There are 1000 call sites.

What value does that 1001 line ChangeLog entry provide?

Absolutely zero, and it's a waste of the submitter's time.  I might
not do the conversion because the ChangeLog is so laborious.

I also find it moronic to say that having someone go through a
laborious process like an automaton is valuable because it shows their
attention to detail and their thoroughness.  On the contrary, one's
ability to proceed through mindless robotic activities are anything
but an indication of this.

I'm pretty sure most developers don't take the ChangeLog seriously at
all, and therefore that's a place where errors are happening anyways.

And I know for a fact that many of Ulrich Drepper's large commits
in the past ommitted many of the changes his patches made.  In fact
he would always commit the ChangeLog update as a completely separate
commit from the changes themselves.

So you can't even say that the ChangeLog provides a way to search for
changes, since it is provably non-trivially incomplete.

ChangeLog files are absolutely of zero value when you have powerful
version control, as we do.