Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful

[Giuseppe Scrivano]

address@hidden (Alfred M. Szmidt) writes:

> ChangeLog entries are trivial and quick to write, and save so much
> time in the future.  The small repetiveness is a insignificant price
> to pay for the benefit of the ChangeLog file in various forms.

Repetiveness, even if small, is still a bad thing when a computer can do
the task for you.

ChangeLogs:

- are error prone as an human needs to write them.  In fact, we needed
  to invent a way to amend ChangeLogs when we generate them from the git
  log (gitlog-to-changelog has a way to amend old ChangeLog entries).

- make merges painful.  Here as well we needed to invent a tool to deal
  with this issue (git-merge-changelog in gnulib).

- assume someone is going to "undo the changes" without any help from
  the computer.  While it is trivial to do this using a DVCS.

- force projects that use gitlog-to-changelog to have a quite unuseful
  log since it is maintained in the changelog format.  As was already
  pointed out in this conversation we miss the *why* in favour of *what*
  changes were done.

Cloning a repository is the de facto way of distributing source
code nowadays.  If there are better practices, I really see no reasons
to not embrace them.  Maintaining ChangeLogs is a waste of time both for
the developers writing them and for whoever is going to use it.

Regards,
Giuseppe