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Re: ChangeLog entry complexity


"Joseph S. Myers" <joseph@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Mar 2013, Eric Wong wrote:
> 
> > As others have said, git is fast and powerful.  There is no benefit to
> > reading a static ChangeLog when one can run git blame/log with the
> > appropriate options to get exactly what you need (and most importantly,
> > quickly filter out what one does not want).
> 
> Given the messy state of the history converted from CVS (sometimes the 
> heuristics to combine separate CVS commits to separate files into a single 
> git commit helped, but sometimes they made things worse), in practice the 
> ChangeLogs are often a better place to find all the history in one place 
> (together with checking the old CVS repository in tricky cases).

Old history becomes less relevant over time.  Old changelogs will
always be available if needed.

> > ChangeLog entries also lead to needing extra tools like
> > git-merge-changelog instead of just doing a plain cherry-pick/am.
> 
> Not having a checked-in ChangeLog leads to on-the-side extra files with 
> corrections to bad log messages and author information, information about 
> multiple authors where git can only show one, etc. (see 
> gitlog-to-changelog --amend).  (I think in principle things such as log 
> messages should themselves be versioned objects so you could refer to the 
> state of the tree as of a particular commit, which would refer not just to 
> the files in the tree and the history of the tree but to the state of the 
> log messages etc. in that history.  But I don't know of any version 
> control systems that do that.)

git has a "notes" feature which allows supplementing commit messages.
I do not think it is very popular (or well known), but it is a standard
part of git for several years, now.  I've never felt the need to use it
myself, though.


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