Re: git history tracking across renames (and emacs support)

["João Távora" <joaotavora@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> You are working too hard, IMO.  I generally write the GNU-style
> ChangeLog entries only when I land a feature on the development
> branch, I don't write them while working on a feature branch.  On a
> feature branch, my log entries are very short and only describe what
> milestones were reached and what significant issues fixed.  So the
> multiple entries and related problems never happen for me.

Yeah I do scratchy local dev work without proper entries too, but I
wasn't talking about that, just about committing twice to the same file
on the same day.  I take it you never do (really?)

> As for the rest, if you insist on not having a real file with
> ChangeLog entries, then perhaps add-log.el could be extended to be
> able to use a buffer name, not just a file name, for where to put the
> log messages.  It already allows you to customize the file name; it
> could do something similar with a buffer name, and that buffer could
> have no file name.  Then a large part of your problems would go away,
> AFAIU.

Yes, this was more or less what I had in mind, except I thought about
encoding that information in a buffer-local variable.  But your idea of
doing it in the buffer's name sounds better.

> (This will not solve the problem in "emacs -Q", but nothing like this
> could ever do that, since it should be obvious that whatever you code
> will be an optional feature.)

Perhaps it could work in emacs -Q if you make the whole feature depend
on a variable which I can set dir-locally (presumably not in Emacs, but
in all my other projects).

> And having the vc-log buffer under change-log-mode is, of course,
> trivial, either with your customizations or by default.

But that in turn would lose me some useful that vc-log functionality.
AFAIU the two modes should be merged, maybe one deriving from the other.

>> But perhaps, before spending time on the patch, you or someone else can
>> tell me if you use ChangeLog for more projects than Emacs and/or how you
>> avoid these annoyances.
>
> I just told you: I have a real ChangeLog file in the repository.  With
> some projects, this file is versioned; with others, it is a local
> untracked file mentioned in .gitignore.  Emacs belongs to the latter
> category.

Right, I was just making sure I wasn't missing some other trick.

I think the changes envisioned above (particularly the fileless
ChangeLog buffer) only justify working on them if noone else is working
on the better alternative, which is IMO to automatically generate the "*
file.ext (changed entity)" list from the diff at commit-preparation
time, as I think someone suggested already.

João