Conerned about lack of detail in ChangeLog/commit messges

[Nick Burrett]

"David O'Brien" <obrien@NUXI.com> writes:

> On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 11:30:21AM -0400, David Edelsohn wrote:
> > David> The diff from 1.25 to 1.26 is large enough to explain the change.
> > David> Looking at ``cvs log gengenrtl.c'' I was unable to find any details on
> > David> the "gcc2-ss-010999" branch.
> > 
> > 	What you list above is the CVS entry, not the ChangeLog entry.
> > The entry in ChangeLog.2 says:
> > 
> >         * Merge from gcc2 snapshot Jan 9, 1999.  See FSFChangeLog for
> >         details.
> 
> Sorry, I was under the impression (from what I've seen in other CVS
> commit messages) that the ChangeLog text is in the commit message.  IMHO
> CVS logs are much easier to use to find the notes on a change than the
> ChangeLog's.  
> 
> GCC ChangeLog's do not use a consistent date format, thus it is time
> consuming to find the entry you are looking for as searching in your
> favorite viewer isn't as good as it could be.  Nor does this ChangeLog
> entry contain the name of the modified file as it should.  In this case,
> I could not use any of the CVS message text in searching for the
> ChangeLog entry except for the word "Merge".

This would be easily resolvable if in future the ChangeLog date and e-mail
header were included in the CVS commit messages.  It would make things
much easier to cross-reference since the CVS date is always going to be
slightly different to the ChangeLog date.  I'm not sure if CVSweb would
cope very well with this though.
 
>  
> > Did you check FSFChangeLog (which contains the ChangeLog entries from the
> > gcc2 development
> 
> I did not.  I forgot that there was a FSFChangeLog vs. just ChangeLog.  I
> guess I'm just used to the other projects who's CVS repo I work with.
> There is an emphasis on detail in commit messages to assist people in
> finding out about changes.  I'm surprised the message above didn't at
> least tell people to see the FSFChangeLog (and give the applicable date
> range) for details on the changes.

Perhaps it would have been better to include the FSFChangeLog directly
into the ChangeLog under a single entry in the same way that is done for
older branches.  It's a bit late in the day for that though.

> > The actual various ChangeLog files are the historical repository, not
> > CVS log entries.
> 
> Yes I know.  IMHO now that the world has access to the CVS logs, they
> could be better used now.

I think it is much easier to look at a ChangeLog than look at the CVS logs
for individual files.  The `cvs log' has to keep on being re-generated,
the ChangeLog is there, fast to access, and provides a good overview
of all files changed, rather than just a few.
 

Nick.