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Re: Rant about ChangeLog entries and commit messages
On Sun, 2 Dec 2007, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> I have never, in 7 years of working on and debugging gcc, found the
> ChangeLog to be useful in debugging a problem.
I find they are useful for finding what has changed in function X (or in
functions matching pattern Y) since 4.1, say (given a bug in 4.1-based
sources that might be fixed by a backport of a more recent patch, which
has been traced to involve function X in some way).
The key feature here of course is not that the logs do not contain "why",
but that they do contain the names of all the functions changed (beyond
purely mechanical "all callers changed" type changes) - and the function
names can be stable even as the functions themselves move between source
files. I think that part of the standards remains useful with logs with
the more detailed "why" as used in the gcc/ada/ directory.
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com