Re: Carbon port emacs-unicode-2 build problem under MacOSX

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

  >       Richard wants the ChangeLog to be massaged in a way
  >     similar to what was done for multi-tty, and when this came up, everybody
  >     ran away screeming (there's about 280KB of ChangeLog entries on the
  >     unicode branch).
  > 
  > It is important to have these change log entries in clean form.
  > 
  > The most important part of the massaging is to get rid of duplicate
  > entries.  For instance suppose a function named foo is added and then
  > changed 10 times.  There will be 11 change log entries for it, but we
  > we only need to keep one: "New function".
  > 
  > Even when a function is not new, sometimes you can simplify its change
  > log data a lot by combining entries.
  > 
  > I don't insist on combining entries when it isn't a simplification.

I have done the majority similar work when the multi-tty branch was
merged.  I was a _HUGE_ _HUGE_ effort. The unicode-2 merge is a few
times (at least 3-4) bigger than that.
On top of that, it is error prone, especially for things that have
changed a lot. And those are the ones that need the most accurate
change descriptions.

Doing this is a very slow process, it needs a lot of editing and very
careful thinking, it cannot be done automatically or with your brain
in autopilot mode.

With that experience in mind, the utility of such editing of the
ChangeLogs seems questionable, it is a lot of up front investment that
is of very limited use (almost none). 

If one needs to look at the history of some change, it can be found in
the log and it is not hard to work your way backwards through the log,
the log entries are currently correct and well written.

With all this in mind, please reconsider the request to have the log
entries edited for the merge. 

Thanks

        --dan