Re: PROPOSAL: Move to git, now that bzr is no longer a req.

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

On 01/03/2014 01:35 AM, Rüdiger Sonderfeld wrote:
> On Friday 03 January 2014 10:17:00 Bastien wrote:
>>> Another question is, whether we still want to write ChangeLogs manually,
>>> or whether we want to extract them from commit comments. That's not such
>>> easy, see all the "fix typo" comments.
>>
>> I'm all for writing them manually, it's a useful exercise.
>>
>> IMHO git commit messages should reproduce ChangeLogs, not the
>> other way around.
>
> Generating them from commit messages would do exactly that.  Right now most
> people copy all or at least parts of the ChangeLog entry to the commit message
> anyway.  I agree that the format is useful and I absolutely agree that the
> commit message should not necessarily only be a copy of the ChangeLog entry.
>
> But those points are not really an obstacle or argument against auto-
> generation of the ChangeLog _files_ from the commit messages

It's a lot safer to fix an error in ChangeLog than to interactively 
rebase and force-push a new history. Would this automated ChangeLog 
generation system be tolerant of manual ChangeLog editing?

If we're going to have ChangeLog files anyway, we're still going to have 
to deal with merging. Since we have to write change descriptions in any 
case and since we already have mature tools for making ChangeLog 
additions, we might as well retain the current system. It would be nice, 
though, to auto-fill commit messages based on ChangeLog deltas.

By the way: git-merge-changelog from gnulib looks useful.