Re: Git migration docs

[Kristian Høgsberg <krh redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 00:22 +0100, Santi Béjar wrote:
>  * ChangeLog: This is one of the most useful files for a developer to
> keep up to date - it lists all the changes that a given  project has
> undergone. In GNOME it is generally of the following form:
> {{{
> YYYY-MM-DD  Joe Bloggs <joe bloggs gnome org>
> 
> 	* filename.c: Use gtk_dialog instead of deprecated gnome-dialog.
> 	Fixes #878372.
> }}}

ChangeLog was useful back when with CVS there was no way to see what
changed in a project and what files was involved with a specific commit.
With git this is a lot less useful as git tracks the changes as atomic
commits and you can easily browse the history using git log, cgit,
giggle, gitk or many other tools.  In fact, when branching and merging,
the ChangeLog gets in the way and always causes merge conflicts.

Historically, the commit message has been of little use and all the
attention has gone to the ChangeLog entry and it's an integral part of
many peoples workflow.  We just need to apply the same discipline and
attention to writing a good commit message instead.  And part of the
GNOME migration process should probably be coming up with a make dist
hook that GNOME modules can add to dump the git log into a ChangeLog
file when making tarballs.

cheers,
Kristian