All, As decided by the Council in its last meeting at the beginning of this month, ChangeLogs will not be generated from VCS commit messages, because the Council wants to keep the ability to edit generated ChangeLog messages [1].
As a result, the Council took this up with the Portage team, to make repoman update the ChangeLog file upon `repoman commit'. Because some of the reasons put forward for autogenerating ChangeLogs was the actual speed of making a commit, repoman does not call echangelog, but instead uses its information about the current state of the VCS directory it already collected to do its QA checks to write a ChangeLog entry directly from Python (in which repoman is written). To facilitate those developers who have echangelog, or their own scripts that do the same, hardwired into their systems, repoman commit will by default *NOT* update the ChangeLog if it is already modified. This allows to run echangelog followed by repoman commit, without getting a double ChangeLog entry. However, this also allows to do all kinds of other actions to the ChangeLog file, without actually adding an entry for the current change being committed, as we've already seen in practice. The Council would like to remind developers that it is still a requirement that all actions are documented in the ChangeLog and that it is hence the responsibility of the committing developer to make sure this requirement is met. Repoman in the most recent Portage versions in the tree, has an --echangelog flag, that takes the argument `y', `n' or `force'. The default for this option can be set to yes or no, and is controlled by metadata/layout.conf. For the `gentoo' (gentoo-x86) repository, this is set to true, which results in the previously described behaviour. When the ChangeLog is modified, but a new entry should still be written by repoman, --echangelog=force will accomplish this. Obviously, passing --echangelog=n makes repoman skip writing a ChangeLog entry at all. The Council hopes to have informed all developers sufficiently through this message. [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20111011-summary.txt -- Fabian Groffen Gentoo on a different level
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