ChangeLog's: do we have to?

[Eric Gallager]

On 7/5/18, 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.
>
> Aldy
>

Many other GNU projects have discussed ditching/autogenerating
ChangeLogs in recent years; see these other mailing list discussion
threads for examples:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/m4-patches/2017-01/msg00010.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-03/msg00904.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-03/msg00180.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-standards/2017-07/msg00000.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2017-08/msg00064.html
https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb/2018-02/msg00025.html

(Some of them cross the month boundary in the archives, so you might
have to click around more to get the whole story)