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

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 01:53 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
[...]
> My personal suspicion is that *some* people who don't want to use
> ChangeLog secretly don't want to write a log message longer than a few
> words, which is easier to get away with in an SCM log than ChangeLog.
> Others avoiding ChangeLog have more noble motivations like the
> elegance of not having two copies of the data, and they write nice log
> messages in the SCM - more power to them.

I have the same suspicion, I'd be willing to bet that we wouldnt be
having this conversation if the proposal were backwards: use changelog
indexes in commit logs.

If we used some kind of index to point to the appropriate changelog
entry from the commit message then there would be no duplication of
data, the data would remain a part of the project and not the SCM
metadata and would retain all of the quality that is expected of a
proper ChangeLog.

ofcourse nobody will buy this because it doesnt save anyone the
time of writing a proper changelog (as Federico pointed out in
his last email, writing a changelog right before you commit is
and should be a *pain in the ass*, rightly so - do your homework,
there is a reason why we take the tedious time to hand craft these
things).

Cheers,
                     -Tristan

PS (a little off topic): I did say I was willing to bet - it would be
hot if we had a list of bugs/features in gnome that nobody wants to work
on but are very important to fix/implement, those bugzilla items should
be on a betting table, the loser of a bet has to tackle and resolve the
issue !

Now, I'm not really feeling so daring as to bet say, bug 56070,
but I'm willing to implement atk support in GtkBuilder by sunday if
someone can prove me wrong by friday :)

Note this bet is a little hard to prove, but a little competative
fire never hurts so I thought I'd throw the idea on the table ;-)