Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Richard Stallman]

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
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  > > A ChangeLog entry is far easier to process by a human, than a large
  > > diff.  For some languages the diffs become really ugly, specially for

  > A logical description of the change at an appropriate level for that 
  > change is even easier for a human to process than the ChangeLog entry.  

What you said is not false, but you've altered the question under
discussion.  AMS was comparing two ways of finding out which functions were
changed and how.  The high-level-only change description does not try
to help do that job.  If we were to adopt your proposal to stop recording
entity names in the history, the history would no longer be an option
for the job in question.

  > People looking at development of a piece of software already have, in 
  > increasing levels of detail:

  ...

  > 4. The mailing list archives, bug tracker etc. with all the surrounding 
  > development discussions.

No, that's too much trouble to access.  So slow, and so much trouble,
that I would never even try.

  > 5. The version control history showing the exact content of every change.

In my work on Emacs, I always had this, but each comparison was
sufficient effort that -- with perhaps hundreds of revisions -- I
really appreciated the help of the entity names in ChangeLog
to tell me which revisions were pertinent to look at.

Perhaps the improvements in history searching, which I myself have
never used, make those entity names less necessary than in the past,
in the case where you have access to such a repository.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See https://stallman.org/skype.html.