From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Paul Eggert Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2016 11:02:02 -0800 Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department Message-ID: <56DDD02A.20809@cs.ucla.edu> References: <56BE7E37.3090708@cs.ucla.edu> <4hd1rw1ubr.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> <83vb50wxhv.fsf@gnu.org> <87y49vz4cg.fsf@acer.localhost.com> <87vb4zb0i4.fsf@gnu.org> <837fheuu6a.fsf@gnu.org> <83twkiteb3.fsf@gnu.org> <83lh5utbxb.fsf@gnu.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1457377355 14339 80.91.229.3 (7 Mar 2016 19:02:35 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2016 19:02:35 +0000 (UTC) Cc: mthl@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Eli Zaretskii , John Wiegley Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Mon Mar 07 20:02:27 2016 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1ad0QF-0005RM-2I for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 07 Mar 2016 20:02:27 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:57763 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ad0QE-0001MA-HY for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:02:26 -0500 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:39767) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ad0Q1-0001LX-43 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:02:14 -0500 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ad0Q0-0006VM-3N for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:02:13 -0500 Original-Received: from zimbra.cs.ucla.edu ([131.179.128.68]:42566) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ad0Pv-0006Te-Bk; Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:02:07 -0500 Original-Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by zimbra.cs.ucla.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id E9C2116057C; Mon, 7 Mar 2016 11:02:03 -0800 (PST) Original-Received: from zimbra.cs.ucla.edu ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (zimbra.cs.ucla.edu [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10032) with ESMTP id ZfILj6E4aWhr; Mon, 7 Mar 2016 11:02:03 -0800 (PST) Original-Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by zimbra.cs.ucla.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1F701160E85; Mon, 7 Mar 2016 11:02:03 -0800 (PST) X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at zimbra.cs.ucla.edu Original-Received: from zimbra.cs.ucla.edu ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (zimbra.cs.ucla.edu [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10026) with ESMTP id xbB2tsbuQLlF; Mon, 7 Mar 2016 11:02:03 -0800 (PST) Original-Received: from penguin.cs.ucla.edu (Penguin.CS.UCLA.EDU [131.179.64.200]) by zimbra.cs.ucla.edu (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 02CB516057C; Mon, 7 Mar 2016 11:02:03 -0800 (PST) User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.6.0 In-Reply-To: <83lh5utbxb.fsf@gnu.org> X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 3.x X-Received-From: 131.179.128.68 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:201069 Archived-At: Let's not go back. Maintaining ChangeLog files by hand with each commit makes it harder to merge changes due to the inevitable collisions with ChangeLog files. Although other projects that continue to use this older style (e.g., glibc) work around the problem by requiring contributors to deal with the hassles, this is one more barrier to contributions and there are better alternatives. On 03/07/2016 09:50 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > mistakes in the log messages are not corrected This is a problem regardless of whether ChangeLog files are updated by each commit. Under either approach, contributors often make mistakes in their ChangeLog entries, and don't bother to fix them because (let's face it) ChangeLog entries are low priority. > there's an unsolved problem of merging from the release branch to master. We can solve that problem. (It hasn't been high priority to fix.) Here's one simple way to fix it: run the automated ChangeLog generator only on the master branch, as was originally intended, and use manual updates to ChangeLog files in other branches. (The hassle of manually maintaining ChangeLog files on emacs-25 will serve to discourage further changes to the emacs-25 branch, which is arguably a good thing. :-) We can come up with a better approach later. > Other projects maintain ChangeLog files in the repository: GCC, > Binutils, GDB, glibc, Texinfo, XEmacs, to name just those that I know > about. These are all longstanding projects that haven't changed their procedures for ages. New projects don't do this, by and large. (XEmacs has gone quiescent, as I understand it, so it's not a good example here.) > We have maintained ChangeLog files in the repo for years, and I don't > remember this ever being a problem, provided that a proper merge tool > (git-merge-changelog for Git) is installed. I often ran into problems. Yes, git-merge-changelog should reduce the number of merge conflicts, but it doesn't eliminate them, and things can be even more confusing when there are conflicts anyway. Also, requiring git-merge-changelog means that many contributors would have to worry about installing and configuring git-merge-changelog, which would be more of a hassle for recruiting contributors. In practice under the old approach many contributors didn't bother, dealt with the merge conflicts by hand, and all too often messed up. I should mention that git-merge-changelog effectively has no maintainer now; if we run into a problem with it, we'll have to maintain it ourselves.