Re: [PATCH] Teach mklog to reference PRs.

[Jakub Jelinek <jakub at redhat dot com>]

On Thu, Aug 01, 2019 at 04:37:40PM +0200, Martin Liška wrote:
> > OT I'm actually quite annoyed by mklog repeating the date/name/email
> > for each changelog, I'd find it much more natural to print that and the
> > list of PRs once and then just those contrib/, gcc/testsuite/ etc.
> > snippets with prefixes (ideally without the ChangeLog: part that I also
> > routinely remove).  Or have mklog option to switch between those two
> > variants.
> 
> Well, I see it better to write it for each ChangeLog file. And I have a script
> that takes all ChangeLog entries and appends them to corresponding files.

You can easily tweak the script to handle the other way too.
Looking around, different people have different style, some people don't
post the date/name/email lines at all, others do, some people post them
multiple times, once for each ChangeLog, others just once, and for the
latter case, some people post gcc/, etc. prefixes before the entries
afterwards, while others don't, and others do it only conditionally
(e.g. when the number of ChangeLog files is too high or it isn't immediately
obvious which ones they are for, say one entry for gcc and one for
gcc/testsuite ChangeLog, or similarly for gcc/cp and gcc/testsuite etc.
isn't hard to figure out and is just noise.
So, either we have multiple options for mklog, so that people if they prefer
some other style don't have to rewrite it all the time, or have one style we
want to recommend.  If the latter, I think it is better to have a style that
is perhaps automatically parseable by a script, on the other side for
readers of the mailing list should minimize unnecessary cruft and
redundancies.  For that I think the email line just once, then empty line,
then PR lines and/or line with short summary as some people use, then
the dirnames of ChangeLog entries (but no ChangeLog, that is always the
case) and actual entries sounds best to me.
So
NNNN-NN-NN  John Doe  <john@doe.com>

gcc/
	* ...
gcc/testsuite/
	* ...
or
NNNN-NN-NN  John Doe  <john@doe.com>
	    Jane Doe  <jane@doe.com>

	PR c/NNNNN
	PR middle-end/NNNNN
gcc/fortran/
	* ...
libgfortran/
	* ...
or
NNNN-NN-NN Jane Doe  <jane@doe.com>

	PNNNNRN - a nice C++2N extension
gcc/cp/
	* ...
gcc/testsuite/
	* ...
seem to be most compact while still parseable by scripts, you simply
duplicate the first few lines until the first line starting with
non-tab/number or until first line starting with tab and *
to all ChangeLog entries.

	Jakub