Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> writes:
>> But the discussion is not the main issue. We should actually go back to
>> having an actively maintained ChangeLog file in the repository, something we
>> stopped doing a year ago. If there's agreement to that, I rest my case.
>
>OK, let's shift this discussion in that direction again.
>
>Given that there are active developers who appreciate and use the ChangeLog
>format, I don't think we are going to remove them just yet. Instead, the
>question has been raised as to whether we should go back to maintaining
>ChangeLog files manually, or continue to generate them from version control as
>we do now.
>
>My vote is to continue generating from version control, and Eli would like to
>go back to direct maintenance. What do others think?

It's no great burden to maintain them manually, once you get used to it; if the developers who are doing the most work would prefer it, then +1 to switching back to the old way of manually maintaining ChangeLogs.

I'll admit, I'm not clear on the advantage myself :-).  The other free software projects I work in use the version control system's logs, without separate ChangeLog files, and it's fine.  Most of those projects use the same commit message conventions (see http://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/), and I can't remember any log search I ever wanted to do that I could have done with ChangeLogs but was unable to do with the vc-system logs -- it's the same information, after all, and the Emacs project can enforce the ChangeLog conventions on git commit logs.

I guess one advantage of manually-maintained ChangeLogs is that the entries can still be fixed or improved after being committed, which isn't in practice possible with git commit logs, once the commits have been pushed upstream.

In any case, I don't mean any of the above as a sour-grapes statement.  I really do believe that if the people doing the most work would prefer manually-maintained ChangeLogs, we should just do that.  It's not that hard for developers.  Heck, all I used to do is take my commit message and put it in the ChangeLog too; that's pretty simple.

-Karl

P.S. For those who use 'git log' rather than ChangeLog when exploring history, the helper `kf-git-show-change' in http://svn.red-bean.com/repos/kfogel/trunk/.emacs may be useful.  With point anywhere inside a commit message from 'git log' output, run that command to display the associated change.