Re: Rant about ChangeLog entries and commit messages

[Ben Elliston <bje at au1 dot ibm dot com>]

> This *is* the information I would expect to be present somewhere in
> GCC history. A clear and detailed information on why the change was
> necessary. Sure, in some case the checkin references a PR, but the PR
> often contains information of what didn't work before the change and
> the same information which is already repeated three times (ChangeLog,
> svn log and svn diff).

Keep in mind that the GNU coding standard introduced ChangeLogs before
networked version control systems.  In those days, you would receive a
GCC release tarball with a ChangeLog.  There was no way to do "svn log"
or "svn diff" operations.

Even in recent years, I have worked on GCC trees that were exported from
the version control systems of other companies and that I did not have
access to.  In these situations, ChangeLogs are quite a bit more
valuable.

Having said that, I find the lack of rationale for some changes to be a
bit irritating.  I know that this should be done through code comments,
but those are often made across the changeset and in different files.
There is rarely a single summary of the need for the change.  It would
be nice to consider a practice similar to that used by NetBSD, which is
to use a paragraph or so describing the need for the change (similar to
what we do when we introduce a patch on gcc-patches) and inserting that
comment into the svn commit message.

Ben