Re: Why have a ChangeLog file if you already have commit messages?

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 01:53 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> I thought "what else uses git?" and decided to pick on Richard,
> http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=packagekit.git;a=log
> 
> I would say this log has many too-short entries in it. So there's
> another data point.

I think the maturity of the piece of software in question affects the
quality of the commit logs / changelog entries quite a lot. 

If you're working on a stable in-production piece of software you tend
to research each change in detail. Often you've been debugging for a
long time and you finally fix it and write down what you figured out
about it.

However, when you're banging out the initial code for a new project its
not really possible to do long detailed changelog entries, as that would
be basically writing the design specification in changelog form.

I'm sure if you look at cairo commit logs from when it was a few months
old they were not as good as they are today.