Re: Script to generate ChangeLogs automatically

[Richard Stallman]

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

I am glad to see someone is working on this.

  > There is a general consensus among the glibc community to stop 
  > maintaining a ChangeLog file and we were told that the requirement for 
  > doing that was to have a script that provided a representation of the 
  > git log that looks similar to a ChangeLog.

Or else, reliable commands for seaching for commits that affect a
particular defun -- commands that don't fail in some cases where the
existing git commands fail.

The basic idea of handling the issue that way is fine.
It just needs to be implemented solidly.

  > 3. For C sources that are modified, the script then generates parse 
  > trees of the old and new version of the file and attempts to find 
  > differences between them at a top level token level.

That is very sophisticated, and perhaps that means it will not be
fooled by simple things that fool the git commands for finding
differences.

However, it might get totally messed up by macros that syntactically
don't parse like valid code.  Have you tried such cases?

If it has a problem like that, it might not be valid in general,
but it might nonetheless be valid for Glibc if Glibc never has
such macros.

  > - Detect changes to comments.  It's just dropping all comments right 
  > now, so changes that are comment-only end up seeming identical.

That is ok.  We don't list comment changes in change log files anyway.

  > - Changes within function definitions, struct members.  The script only 
  > knows that it changed, not what changed inside.

In general, it requires human intelligence to describe WHAT was changed.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)