Rant about ChangeLog entries and commit messages

[Daniel Berlin]

On 12/2/07, Richard Kenner <kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu> wrote:
> > If all the changelog entry says is something like
> >
> > (xyz): new function
> >
> > I don't see much point, since a diff can always easily tell
> > you *what* was changed.
>
> The point is that, by just looking at the ChangeLog, you can tell when
> xyz was introduced and by whom.  I've used that quite a number of
> times.  Moreover, as was pointed out, when you have a source
> distribution, you don't get the commit logs, just the ChangeLog.
There are in fact, already programs that will generate GNU format
changelogs from svn log (see http://ch.tudelft.nl/~arthur/svn2cl/)
It would be very easy to run these as part of the release process.

Last time I looked, this is in fact how some GNU projects generate
ChangeLog for distribution!

>