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Re: Repository for the conversion machinery
- From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr at thyrsus dot com>
- To: Richard Biener <richard dot guenther at gmail dot com>
- Cc: DJ Delorie <dj at redhat dot com>, GCC Development <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2015 06:41:30 -0400
- Subject: Re: Repository for the conversion machinery
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <55F98EF7 dot 4030401 at redhat dot com> <20150916170644 dot GA412 at redhat dot com> <xneghxlplr dot fsf at greed dot delorie dot com> <CAFiYyc0xegRpgj+60+d15eQGx3=GhVr2swvabKw6yY+DnaVoQQ at mail dot gmail dot com>
- Reply-to: esr at thyrsus dot com
Richard Biener <richard.guenther@gmail.com>:
> Not sure why we can't label the individual commits with Authors scraped
> from the ChangeLog entries in that commit. Some commits even have
> multiple authors after all! And if that fails I'd rather use the @gcc.gnu.org
> identity.
Because associating ChangeLog entries with repo commits is really
hard. You talk as though there's a neat 1-1 mapping with every commit
containing one correctly-written ChangeLog comment. That's never the
case in the wild, and any plan that assumes it will be is doomed.
I've been to this rodeo before on other GNU projects and the problem
is pretty much AI-complete. That is, a human can do it relatively easily by
applying contextual knowledge, a computer program can't.
We can't count on the dates to match. There's a whole world of pain
there beginning with the fact that the ChangeLog timestamp and the
commit timestamp can easily be generated across opposite sides
of a top-of-second even if the ChangeLog timestamp was made by a Lisp
hook in Emacs. And continuing with timezone and DST fooups.
We also can't count on the Subversion username of the commit to match any
address in the ChangeLog comment. In fact this is the exact problem we
started out trying to solve.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>