Re: Abolishing ChangeLog files (was: On the subject of Git, Bazaar, and the future of Emacs development)

[Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com>]

On 28 mrt. 2013, at 10:55, Christopher Schmidt <christopher@ch.ristopher.com> wrote:

> David Engster <deng@randomsample.de> writes:
>> The most time consuming thing is fixing ChangeLogs (we don't have any
>> in CEDET and generate them from commit logs).
> 
> I would like to suggest another change - how about removing ChangeLog
> files from the development repository.  I think these files are
> redundant to the commit log of the vc.
> 
> Removing the files from the repository would clean diffs and reduce
> merge conflicts.  Considering distributed vc, a project's history cannot
> be thought of as to be list of consecutive increments.
> 
> Distributions of Emacs could include ChangeLog files generated from the
> vc commit log, of course.
> 
> Do I make sense?  Are there any drawbacks?


I think it makes sense.  In fact, org-mode does already create
ChangeLog entries automatically from git commit messages.  We
enforce commit message to have a section that does look just
like a ChangeLog entry, and we extract these when the time
is ripe for another merge with Emacs.  Here is a recent
example of such a commit message:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
org.el (org-store-link): Storing multiple links in the active region now requires a triple prefix argument

* org.el (org-store-link): Storing multiple links in the active region now
  requires a triple prefix argument.


Thanks to Matt Lundin for reporting bugs in this area.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Indeed, this process does get rid of many conflicts, because the adding of text to the
beginning of a file (like ChangeLog) often causes merge conflicts.  And it avoids a lot of duplicate work.

- Carsten