On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, Thorsten Glaser wrote: > 4) [svn] Get rid of the forced "ChangeLog" entry > - writing (it's already the changeset's commit message) > - formatting (can't that be done automagically?) > - rotating (d'oh) > > I've always found the FSF's ChangeLog policy a bit weird > (for CVS projects - for RCS projects it's understandable).
ChangeLog files are highly useful for doing a cvs update and then looking to see what changed recently - without noting the version number previously had, and that now had, to do a log of just the relevant part. Similarly they are useful in snapshots and releases. Automatic generation on checkout or similar doesn't suffice since svn doesn't version the log messages themselves - although in principle in a system with log messages being versioned you could allow all people with write access freely to fix typos in and otherwise correct log messages and derive ChangeLogs from the log messages at checkout/export. In practice there is a very stylised (but not universally followed) relation between log messages and ChangeLog entries; the header lines from the ChangeLog entries are included in the log message iff you're committing someone else's patch, and commits to multiple directories with separate ChangeLogs should indicate in the log message which ChangeLogs are involved. But the log message does not distinguish which of someone's multiple email addresses they are using in their ChangeLog entry. -- Joseph S. Myers http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal mail) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (CodeSourcery mail) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)
