Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful

[Joseph Myers]

On Sat, 29 Jul 2017, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

> People keep saying that they are useless, but so far no example of why
> they are useless have been presented or even the slightest argument
> was to how one could extract similar information from VCS.  neither
> diff nor annotate provide this information, they cannot do so in a
> generic way and the only way to do it is to write it manually.

"how one could extract similar information" is asking the wrong question.  
It's better to ask at the level of problems to be solved, such as finding 
what change might have introduced a bug.  Which can be done with much more 
certainty and automation with the VCS, through tools such as "git bisect" 
(and just as you could look for potentially relevant changes in a 
ChangeLog, so you could look for them in git logs to guess a starting 
point for bisection).

> It is clearly more useful to read the following to grasp what
> happened,
> 
>         * sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/powerpc/sys/ucontext.h (NFPREG)
>         [__WORDSIZE != 32]: Rename to __NFPREG and define NFPREG to
>         __NFPREG if [__USE_MISC].

My point is that the logical description, not naming the individual 
renamed entities, is even more useful, especially if you them look at the 
bug in Bugzilla which contains a sequence of such descriptions for patches 
addressing particular areas of the same underlying bug.  Tools such as 
version control systems, list archives, bug trackers are all there to be 
used in understanding past and current development, rather than 
artificially avoided with an attempt to get all the information in a 
single file.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
address@hidden