Re: On autogenerated ChangeLog

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 09:06 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
>> I like the more verbose format clearly showing which changes are big and which 
>> are small.
> 
> Well, I don't really disagree that its nice to know. However, all such
> info is readily availible in git

Right. People who want the full git history are also going to want to
have a full checkout handy, and they can just use "git log" with
whatever flags they like.

Here's something to generate a fairly traditional-looking ChangeLog
(though working on the assumption that you're doing the subject vs body
split in your git commit messages):

git log --date=short --pretty=format:"@@@@%cd  %an  <%ae>%n%n%s%n%n%b" |
perl -ne 'if (/^\s*$/) { if (!$blank) { print; $blank=1; } } else
{$blank=0; if (!s/^@@@@// && !/^\t/) { print "\t"; } print; }'

%cd is commit date, %an is Author name and %ae is Author email. The perl
part indents every commit description line that doesn't already start
with a tab, and removes duplicate blank lines. Assuming the lines were
wrapped to 72 columns to start with, this will make them look too long,
but won't actually cause anything new to wrap.

-- Dan