Re: Stop updating ChangeLog?

[John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd dot org>]

On Monday, February 05, 2018 04:00:36 PM Yao Qi wrote:
> Hi all,
> The discussion in this thread
> https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2018-02/msg00012.html
> leads to a discussion that whether we still need ChangeLog.  I start
> a new thread to get more attention on this topic.
> 
> In current development, we need to write one ore more changelog
> entries for each commit, put them into both git commit log and
> ChangeLog files.  How much we can change to existing mode
> depends the answers to these following questions,
> 
>  #1 Are ChangeLog files useful in GDB releases to various people
>  who build GDB releases?
>  #2 Are ChangeLog files useful in GDB repo to various GDB
>  developers?
> 
> a) If answers are Yes/Yes, we keep unchanged,
> b) If answers are No/No, we don't need to write changelog entries in
> git commit log, nor updating ChangeLog file,
> c) If answer are Yes/No, developers still have to write changelog
> entries in git commit log, and we can generate ChangeLog on
> release from git log.
> d) If answers are No/Yes, get use to git to get the information from
> git log instead of ChangeLog,
> 
> My answers are No/No, so I suggest that we do b).  I can live up with
> c), but that needs change in the release process.  What do you think?

I probably have a bit of a biased view as most of my development work is done
without ChangeLogs, so I'm used to just using web interfaces (svnweb, gitweb)
or vc-annotate in Emacs or the like (git log -S is also super helpful) when
examining history.  I also find the contents of a ChangeLog as I currently
understand it to be a description of the diff (but not the "why"), so I find
it to be redundant with 'git diff' rather than providing new information (as
opposed to the "why" we currently include in commit messages).  That probably
puts me in the No/No camp.

c) would save some work on having to always do 'rebase -i' passes to fixup
dates in the ChangeLog files before pushing an approved series.  (I use
git-merge-changelog which at last moves the added entries to the top, but I
still have to go fixup all the dates by hand.)  b) would eliminate a fair bit
of bookkeeping work in my GDB time as Simon has noted.

-- 
John Baldwin