Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful

[Joseph Myers]

On Fri, 4 Aug 2017, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

> ChangeLog entries are trivial and quick to write, and save so much

This whole proposal is because they are not at all trivial or quick to 
write for the sorts of changes that are common in projects such as glibc 
or GCC, which are very different from the small local changes illustrated 
in the example ChangeLog entries in the GNU Coding Standards.  They also 
serve unnecessarily to isolate GNU from the broader free software 
community and discourage people working on a wide range of free software 
from contributing to GNU, by adding an additional GNU-specific format 
people need to learn that isn't useful elsewhere, when many extremely 
active free software projects such as the Linux kernel have evidently 
found fully functional ways of understanding code history and achieving 
the purposes of ChangeLogs without the ChangeLog format - ways which are 
useful extremely broadly across free software rather than being 
GNU-specific as ChangeLogs are.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
address@hidden