Re: Git migration docs

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 14:38 -0500, Kristian Høgsberg wrote:
>> I don't see many references or much reasoning here, just assertions.
>> How is it not possible for a disciplined developer, who's trained to
>> commit small, self contained changes and document them in a ChangeLog to
>> apply that same discipline to writing a good commit message instead?
>> Look to the kernel, cairo, the X.org modules for examples of projects
>> that successfully use the VCS commit messages and no ChangeLog.  I don't
>> think it's justified or necessary to call the people who work on these
>> projects lazy and selfish.
>
> No, those projects don't write good-enough commit messages and their
> generated ChangeLogs are not good enough. The routine has made people
> lazy and allowed them to be selfish. Of course there are plenty of
> projects that are far worse, regardless of use of git.
>
> Here's a URL of a good-enough ChangeLog:
> http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gtk%2B/trunk/ChangeLog?view=markup
>
> I don't think you can provide a URL of a generated-from-commit-messages
> ChangeLog that is good enough, though people often asserts that one
> exists, and the tools cannot tell me what a human being told me in a
> good ChangeLog, because the tools cannot read minds.

This is just FUD. Here is a counter examples of a changelog which is
generated from commit messages[1] which are A) more informative that
your citation and B) compiled by developers whom in every respect are
more casually contributing to Gnome than those committing to GTK+. I
think the evidence is clearly in favor of auto-generated changelog
especially after taking in to account the inane annoyance imposed by
manual changelogs for multi-way merging. And this is to say nothing of
the fact that no developer is going to actually read the physical
changelog file from a tarball release as Kristian pointed out.

[1] http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/desktop/2.25/2.25.4/sources/epiphany-2.24.2.1.tar.bz2

We (gnome-games) are switching to git-svn generated commit logs for
2.25.5 and will use git to do so once it's official. svn's log format
is deficient (surprise!).