Re: Conerned about lack of detail in ChangeLog/commit messges

["David O'Brien" <obrien at NUXI dot com>]

On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 11:30:21AM -0400, David Edelsohn wrote:
> David> The diff from 1.25 to 1.26 is large enough to explain the change.
> David> Looking at ``cvs log gengenrtl.c'' I was unable to find any details on
> David> the "gcc2-ss-010999" branch.
> 
> 	What you list above is the CVS entry, not the ChangeLog entry.
> The entry in ChangeLog.2 says:
> 
>         * Merge from gcc2 snapshot Jan 9, 1999.  See FSFChangeLog for
>         details.

Sorry, I was under the impression (from what I've seen in other CVS
commit messages) that the ChangeLog text is in the commit message.  IMHO
CVS logs are much easier to use to find the notes on a change than the
ChangeLog's.  

GCC ChangeLog's do not use a consistent date format, thus it is time
consuming to find the entry you are looking for as searching in your
favorite viewer isn't as good as it could be.  Nor does this ChangeLog
entry contain the name of the modified file as it should.  In this case,
I could not use any of the CVS message text in searching for the
ChangeLog entry except for the word "Merge".

 
> Did you check FSFChangeLog (which contains the ChangeLog entries from the
> gcc2 development

I did not.  I forgot that there was a FSFChangeLog vs. just ChangeLog.  I
guess I'm just used to the other projects who's CVS repo I work with.
There is an emphasis on detail in commit messages to assist people in
finding out about changes.  I'm surprised the message above didn't at
least tell people to see the FSFChangeLog (and give the applicable date
range) for details on the changes.

> The actual various ChangeLog files are the historical repository, not
> CVS log entries.

Yes I know.  IMHO now that the world has access to the CVS logs, they
could be better used now.

-- 
-- David    (obrien@NUXI.com)