Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Mike Gerwitz]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 14:11:23 +0000, Joseph Myers wrote:
>> Entities are concrete,
>> unambiguous---you can phrase them only one way.
>
> For the example I gave of Makefile entity names involving complicated GNU 
> make constructs, that needed to be wrapped over multiple lines, that's not 
> the case.
>
> For cases where what's really changing is conditionals rather than 
> entities, there's significant ambiguity about how to write them in the 
> ChangeLog entry.  [foo || bar] or [defined foo || defined bar]?  Do you do 
> "* [foo]: Remove conditional code." or list the individual entities 
> removed within [foo]?  If it's a makefile conditional, do you use [ifeq 
> ($(foo), bar)] or [$(foo) = bar]?
>
> Where the full name of an entity is long - with namespace or class 
> qualification, or requiring parameter types for an overloaded function - 
> exactly what form do you use?

That's a fair argument that's in some cases can be difficult to solve
even with convention.  But their existence/frequency depends on the type
of project.  If you look through the Emacs ChangeLogs, for example, Lisp
entities are easy to convey.

So I concede that the entity format of ChangeLogs aren't a
one-size-fits-all type of thing.

-- 
Mike Gerwitz
Free Software Hacker+Activist | GNU Maintainer & Volunteer
GPG: D6E9 B930 028A 6C38 F43B  2388 FEF6 3574 5E6F 6D05
https://mikegerwitz.com

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