ChangeLog's: do we have to?

[Martin Sebor]

On 07/05/2018 02:07 AM, Richard Biener wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 5, 2018 at 9:47 AM Aldy Hernandez <aldyh@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> After 20 years of hacking on GCC I feel like I have literally wasted
>> days of my life typing out ChangeLog entries that could have easily been
>> generated programmatically.
>>
>> Can someone refresh my memory here, what are the remaining arguments for
>> requiring ChangeLog entries?
>>
>> I vaguely recall Jakub (or Alex Oliva??) mentioning that they were
>> desired for releases.  If this is the case, may I volunteer to write the
>> necessary scripts to generate these automatically?
>>
>> It would be nice if we could have meaningful commit messages explaining
>> why we are doing things, and any list of changed files be generated on
>> the fly.
>>
>> Sorry, I'm getting old, and would hate to spend any meaningful remaining
>> time typing things that a computer can do for me.
>
> They are definitely useful in my day-to-day work when tracking down changes
> given I can easily grep them.
>
> I think that any change here should be _after_ we've switched to git (finally).

ChangeLogs could be auto-generated from svn logs.  It could be
done every night to make even recent changes available to those
who prefer using the files.

FWIW, even though I've automated for myself the most tedious
and error-prone aspects of GCC ChangeLogs(*) I'm very much in
favor of Aldy's proposal.  As others have noted, describing
changes can be a helpful part of the self-review process,
but having to do it in two places is an entirely avoidable
busywork.  The commit log is the place for change descriptions.
With the right structure other formats can be generated from
it.  With git-svn, git log can find all the same things that
grepping ChangeLogs can, plus much more, without putting
a strain on the server.

Martin

[*] Splitting up change descriptions into the right ChangeLog
files, enumerating the files and functions changed by the commit,
the repetitive "New test." for each test, including the bug id
with the right GCC component, putting tabs in all the right
places and avoiding spaces where they're not supposed to be.
Until the drudgery of manually creating ChangeLogs finally
goes away I'm happy to share the script that does this if
someone is interested.