This is the mail archive of the
libc-alpha@sourceware.org
mailing list for the glibc project.
Re: Removing ChangeLog [Was Re: 2.26 hard freeze status]
On 08/03/2017 12:15 PM, Rical Jasan wrote:
> but even though the ChangeLog isn't necessarily useful to me with a VCS,
> the requirement that there has always been one and will always be one so
> that a /consistent/ history of changes exists -- even if it isn't as
> powerful as something like `git log' or `git bisect' -- is a compelling
> enough argument that I don't have an immediate rebuttal.
>
> Even in glibc, the project has used multiple VCS, but the ChangeLog
> remains, throughout all the messy, un-bisectable, batch-committed
> history, which is what I was alluding to by /persistent/.
I regularly have to do archaeology on the sources, and the ChangeLog
rarely contains useful information. (The GNU standards require that it
is mechanically derived from the changes themselves, and the old glibc
code followed that.) The ChangeLogs do point to the author, and while
many of them can be easily reached for comments, naturally they do not
remember what they did 15, 20 years ago and why. :-/
The bug tracker references in the ChangeLog are definitely helpful, but
only if the bug tracker is still around. (The older ones refer to an
internal GNU or Cygnus tracker.)
Florian