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Re: ChangeLog's: do we have to?
- From: Eric Gallager <egall at gwmail dot gwu dot edu>
- To: Aldy Hernandez <aldyh at redhat dot com>
- Cc: GCC Mailing List <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>, Jakub Jelinek <jakub at redhat dot com>
- Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2018 13:37:30 -0400
- Subject: Re: ChangeLog's: do we have to?
- References: <6f84c126-136e-7f6d-ec69-4775a58610a4@redhat.com>
On 7/5/18, Aldy Hernandez <aldyh@redhat.com> wrote:
> After 20 years of hacking on GCC I feel like I have literally wasted
> days of my life typing out ChangeLog entries that could have easily been
> generated programmatically.
>
> Can someone refresh my memory here, what are the remaining arguments for
> requiring ChangeLog entries?
>
> I vaguely recall Jakub (or Alex Oliva??) mentioning that they were
> desired for releases. If this is the case, may I volunteer to write the
> necessary scripts to generate these automatically?
>
> It would be nice if we could have meaningful commit messages explaining
> why we are doing things, and any list of changed files be generated on
> the fly.
>
> Sorry, I'm getting old, and would hate to spend any meaningful remaining
> time typing things that a computer can do for me.
>
> Aldy
>
Many other GNU projects have discussed ditching/autogenerating
ChangeLogs in recent years; see these other mailing list discussion
threads for examples:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/m4-patches/2017-01/msg00010.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-03/msg00904.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-03/msg00180.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-standards/2017-07/msg00000.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2017-08/msg00064.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb/2018-02/msg00025.html
(Some of them cross the month boundary in the archives, so you might
have to click around more to get the whole story)