Notes from the version control BOF at the summit

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Fri, 4 Jun 2004, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> The main serialization problem is, of course, the ChangeLog file.  For
> most of these systems, it should be possible to write an automatic
> merge for the ChangeLog file which will do the right thing.

Or generate the ChangeLog automatically from checkin comments.  (The last
item in Zack's previous wishlist
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-12/msg00444.html>.)

With such automatic generation, it would be nice for the checkin comments
themselves to be versioned objects, so that a spelling or other correction
could be checked in to a previous checkin comment (and automatically
update the ChangeLogs thereby, without changing the history of ChangeLogs
on old tags corresponding to the previously tagged version of the checkin
comment) - but with this being a versioned action with the history
properly recorded, it would be safer than cvs admin to have available to
all with write access.  But I don't know if any version control systems do
have versioning of checkin comments.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm@polyomino.org.uk