Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?

[Robert Weiner <rsw@gnu.org>]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 10:20 AM, Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> wrote:
> A big advantage of pull requests is that they can group commits, so each
> commit doesn't need the level of detail it does today, and so the
> evolution of the work is visible to a reviewer.
>
> Then ChangeLogs become simply documentation for the merged code,
> together with actual docs and other notes that are needed. The pull
> request system can later provide *everything* that a ChangeLog could,
> and more (such as better searching and cross-referencing) so in the long
> term the ChangeLog can go away.

ChangeLogs can group commits of code changes quite simply (just group
the change comments together) and have the advantage that no special
tools are needed to review them, just browse them linearly or search
for changes within a specific release.  I would be in favor of
grouping changes spanning multiple days together and using the final
date rather than having them split into separate entries by day.

I agree that having to provide secondary commentary in a commit log is
a pain and duplicative of effort but I don't have any suggestion for
solution on that.

Bob