On Fri, May 01, 2020 at 10:37:48PM +0200, Martin Jambor wrote: > On Fri, May 01 2020, Jeff Law wrote: > >> I also find writing them useful as it forces me to go through every > >> patch one last time before submitting it :-) If you spend some time > >> configuring your text editor and git, the boilerplate stuff can be > >> generated automatically. > > Agreed on all the points above. I can't count how many patches I've > > written through the years, then got to the ChangeLog step and realized > > that further work was needed. > > I can relate to that :-)
How hard it is to write the changelog for a patch is a very good canary for if the patch should be split into a few pieces. For example, unrelated changes (whitespace for example) should never be part of the same patch. Unrelated cleanups, or restructurings to make it easier to fit in the new changes, belong to a preparatory patch (or very sometimes one at the end of the series -- which is sometimes easier to do as well, even if it is not the best idea). If a patch does ten gazillion the same changes, it helps to have that as a separate patch. Bisectability problems (the tree should work after every commit) are usually easily solved with some strategically placed (temporary) "if", or the like. > >> I do not think this can be provided in any other way that would not > >> resemble a ChangeLog. I do support the effort to put them into commit > >> messages only though (and then perhaps generate the files from that). > > That's where I lean as well. I could also live with the ChangeLog being > > generated by a commit hook > > Please note that this would change the commit hash from what the author > had on their computer, which would be a bit unfortunate. But generating > them along with the "Daily bump" seems like a nice alternative. Yeah, the latter is much nicer, eventually at least. Segher
