Re: Rant about ChangeLog entries and commit messages

[Jeffrey Law <law at redhat dot com>]

On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 08:29 -0500, Richard Kenner wrote:
> > Sorry, but again, this is not a good enough justification to me.
> > We do a lot of things different than "The GNU Project".
> > So do plenty of parts of the "official GNU project".
> > They use different coding standards, bug tracking systems, version
> > control systems, checkin policies, etc, than each other.
> 
> Yes, but none of those are visible other than to the development community.
> People who obtain the source distributions of projects don't get to see
> those things.  They DO see things like the ChangeLog format and coding
> and documentation conventions and THOSE are the things that need to be
> common among GNU projects.
> 
> In my view, ChangeLog is mostly "write-only" from a developer's
> perspective.  It's a document that the GNU project requires us to produce
> for the benefit of people who DON'T want access to our checkin-logs, bug
> tracking information, and mailing lsits.  But for our own development
> purposes, we use the above information much more than ChangeLog.
Right.

I don't necessarily want verbose ChangeLogs -- there are times I just 
want to know what changed and who changed it.  That's nice and easy to
extract from the ChangeLog.

Sometimes I want to look at the code/comments.  Obviously I go to the 
source to read those.

Sometimes I want even more information for a particularly complex
or controversial change -- in those cases I go back to the mailing list
archives and review the discussion(s) leading to changes to the code.


Each repository of information provides a different level of detail and
each (IMHO) has its place/utility.

Jeff