Re: Generating the ChangeLog files from the commit messages

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

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 6:15 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> In Bug#19113 I just now proposed patches to generate the ChangeLogs
> combined. This was easier, as it's what other GNU projects do and I borrowed
> their code. If someone would like to change the generation procedure to
> tease out various subdirectories' changes, please feel free.  (There's no
> rush to do this, as the procedure matters only when making a new release.)
> Other comments are welcome too.

I glanced through the gitlog-to-changelog script, and it appears to
pass all arguments after “--” to git log. git log accepts as
arguments, among other things, zero or more file or subdirectory paths
to limit the log to. To disambiguate paths from branch heads and tags,
one adds another “--” in between.

Example:

…/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”.

(I have not tried this.)