Re: Script to generate ChangeLogs automatically

[Richard Stallman]

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  > > If it is acceptable to them _and_ it gives correct output in all cases
  > > that can appear in glibc, then I say yes.

  > I think "in all cases" is not realistic; there are cases of structural 
  > changes where any description in terms of named entities will be a mess, 

I doubt that.  Whatever the changes were, it is possible to list
the entities that were changed, the entities that were deleted, and
the entities that were added.

To determine these lists does not require understanding the substance
of the changes.  It is enough to see where nontrivial (non-comment,
non-whitespace) changes were made, and then determine which entities
they affect, first in the old version and then in the new version.

  > from the use of macros to 
  > generate function definitions that makes it hard to identify relevant 
  > entities

Indeed, the script to do this needs to be able to handle any nonstandard
entity-defining constructs used in the package at hand.  But I expect
that not to be very hard.

How many such constructs are used in glibc?  Could you post a list
of what they are and what they look like?

For each of these constructs, we need code to find all its occurrences
in a file and report, for each occurrence,

(1) the name of the entity it defines, and
(2) the range of line numbers it occupies.

That is all that is needed for the script to reliably make a list of
the entity names affected by a change.  How about trying to write it?
That is the way to find out whether it is a real obstacle.

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