Re: time to retire ChangeLog?

Raymond Toy <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.lisp.clisp.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
>>>>> "Sam" == Sam Steingold <[email protected]> writes:

    Sam> Hi Bruno,
    >> * Bruno Haible <[email protected]> [2017-02-23 01:03:18 +0100]:
    >> 
    >>> ChangeLog is obsolete. Even Emacs does not use it anymore.
    >> Different groups of developers make different choices.

    Sam> Emacs is by far the oldest / most conservative project still active.
    Sam> (I think)

    >> 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.

    Sam> Nope. We never lost history, and, barring a global cataclysm, never will.

I think there's a huge difference between history (source control
system) and explanation of the history (changelog and commit
messages).

On many open source projects the commit messages basically tend to
suck.  The say incomplete things like "fix bug". What bug?  And the
actual diff contains the fix and lots of other stuff.  Changelogs tend
to force you to more precisely that you changed this function to do
this and that function to fix something else.

But I've seen bad Changelog entries too.

If people wrote good commit messages, then a Changelog wouldn't be
needed.

So I hate writing changelogs and will instead try to make the commit
message equivalent to the changelog.

My 2 cents, anyway.

--
Ray


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