Re: time to retire ChangeLog?

Hi Sam,

> ChangeLog is obsolete. Even Emacs does not use it anymore.

Different groups of developers make different choices.

> While I see obvious benefits

The not so obvious benefits are:

  - We can really keep track of the history over long periods of time.
    Whereas when we rely on a VCS, we lose info at each move to a different
    location. (Like the gmane.org article URLs became obsolete six months ago.)
    In the recent move of libffcall from cvs to git we did not lose info,
    but it cost me two days of work to achieve this result.

  - You get educated to review your changes before committing them.

  - You can access a ChangeLog without any tools, just with a text editor.

> for me the main drawback is that it
> dramatically increases the probability of conflicts.

1) There is a tool for automatically resolving these conflicts:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=lib/git-merge-changelog.c
You find the installation instructions at lines 42..48, 77..88 of this file.

2) Even without it, yes there would be conflicts, but they are easy to resolve,
since you remember what you have added. Conflicts are only difficult to resolve
if you don't remember what were your changes versus what were the other person's
changes.

> If I make a local commit and do not push it right away, it is almost
> certain that I will have to go through either merge or strip/recommit
> because rebase will definitely fail.

It is not the intent of ChangeLog that you feel the need to push
immediately. Just keep the same patience as before.

In all projects I work in (from gnulib to libffcall), I find ChangeLogs useful.
In projects without ChangeLog (e.g. XFree86), I found it hard to work.

I admit that in projects with many branches and merges (like the github workflow)
ChangeLogs are not appropriate. But clisp is not in this situation.

Bruno


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