Re: Generating the ChangeLog files from the commit messages

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> Yuri Khan wrote:
>>
>> …/emacs $ gitlog-to-changelog --since=2014-11-18 -- foo -- lisp
>>
>> should generate a changelog from the commits reachable from the branch
>> head “foo” authored on or after 2014-11-18 and touching any files in
>> the subdirectory “lisp”.
>
> Thanks, but that would generate duplicates in the ChangeLog files.  For
> example, if a patch updates both lisp/Makefile.in and src/Makefile.in, it
> would copy the patch's change log entry to both lisp/ChangeLog and
> src/ChangeLog.

True. What is the existing practice for such cases? Does a changelog
entry go into the ChangeLog file of the deepest common ancestor of all
changes or what?

> Plus, it's not clear how to generate the "leftover"
> ChangeLog at the top level, which contains everything not in the subsidiary
> ChangeLogs.

I do not have an elegant solution to this problem.

A kludgy solution involves taking the list of top-level files,
filtering out directories which have separate ChangeLogs, and passing
the rest to git-log.

…/emacs$ git log -- $(ls | grep -vE
'leim|doc|lwlib|nt|msdos|lisp|admin|src|lib-src|oldXmenu|nextstep|test')