GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 361890
Update/Use Changelog
Last modified: 2006-10-13 17:26:12 UTC
We should really keep the changelog updated, especially in CVS where it can be a real pain in the arse to try and figure out what happened with each change. Its not to hard to maintain as long as we keep it consistent.
Created attachment 74619 [details] [review] Updated changelog I'm gonna commit this since the current ChangeLog is so out of date its really quite worthless, this is a more or less complete one generated with cvs2cl (a perl script which basically generates a ChangeLog from our CVS log) its not that special, but I would really like it if we kept it up, just make it part of our committing/patching process and its no biggie, we could even add the handy 'prepare-ChangeLog.pl' script to the repository to help with general ease of use. (and I have no problem making a prepare-ChangeLog in another language, or just a shell script if we have a major objection to using the perl one) Its just I saw a bunch of new cool commits today, but cia was down and I couldn't see the commit logs, which would have been nice. Just a thought, feel free to yell at me about this one, but it just seems like a good idea. Once we move to subversion, its not a big deal to kill the ChangeLog, since subversion makes repo-wide log viewing easy, but until then, this seems like a good habit to get into.
I used to religiously add changes to Changelog till the demon of lazziness overpowered me :-). I vouch to try that once again. But really, this has been a policy question. I remember Dan Winship asking in IRC about Changelog and our dear maintainer suggesting him to ignore the Changelog and instead rely on CVS history. I started ignoring Changelog sometime after that. I will leave the policy decision to whoever knows about the moral/technical/psychological issues of CVS0history/Changelog/ but do post here what the lesser mortals should do in the future :).
I don't intend to use changelogs, partly because of pennance for not using subversion, and partly because we have existing tools (ie, CIA, the GNOME cvs commits list, bonsai and viewcvs) which do a better job of associating the changes with the actual code changes. Changelogs are a sorry substitute. If you want to keep it updated through a generation script, that's fine, but I don't plan on editing them myself.