Re: On autogenerated ChangeLog

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

Dan Winship wrote:
> Who are these people who read
> ChangeLog, and what is it that they're doing with it, such that NEWS is
> too brief, but a fully-VCS-ed source tree is unnecessary.

Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> The ChangeLog are quite handy for distribution packages, they have a
> list of the changes you can look at quickly and the closed bug numbers.
> Usually NEWS summary are either not there or listing only main changes
> in the new version and not enough to know what bugs you can close while
> doing the upgrade for example

Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote:
> Sysadmins and they take the decision if it worth an update/upgrade or
> when they should do it.

In theory, this is exactly what NEWS is supposed to be for. But looking
through the NEWS files for 2.26.1, I can see that for many packages
ChangeLog is vastly more useful for this than NEWS is (or at least, if
you only had NEWS, you'd have to do a lot of bugzilla lookups too).

At any rate (popping the stack) neither of these use cases would benefit
from having filenames listed in the ChangeLog entries, so I'm still
liking the command I posted before.

-- Dan