[Evolution-hackers] Rebooting ChangeLog files in 3.x

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

Now that we're using Git for source control, our ChangeLog files are
redundant because the content is already available in Git's commit
history.

Worse, the change history we provide in release tarballs is partitioned
across multiple ChangeLog files in the source tree, making it difficult
to search.  Evolution is the worst offender with 74 different ChangeLog
and ChangeLog.pre-1-4 files.

I'd like to clean this up in 3.0, so unless I hear objections, after we
branch for GNOME 2.30 I'm going to remove all the ChangeLog* files in
the evolution, evolution-data-server, evolution-exchange, and gtkhtml
repositories [1] and replace them with a single top-level ChangeLog
placeholder file whose contents will be automatically populated with
commit messages when creating release tarballs.

The procedure for this is documented here:
http://live.gnome.org/Git/ChangeLog

Since the Evolution project is over a decade old and our complete change
history is mammoth and unnecessary to ship in every tarball, I'm going
to cut the generated ChangeLog off at the commit tag corresponding to
GNOME 2.30.0.  Hence the "reboot" reference.

Our complete change history will still be archived in git as well as
older release tarballs and branches.

Matthew Barnes


[1] evolution-mapi developers: if you'd like me to set this up for you
    too just say so, otherwise I'll keep my mitts off.