Re: Script to generate ChangeLogs automatically

[Richard Stallman]

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  > And when the actual change is a rearrangement of the contents of the file, 
  > or a rearrangement between multiple files, or a change to the surrounding 
  > #if conditionals rather than the individual functions, such a list is a 
  > mess and useless for actually understanding the change.

I think you're arguing about a non-issue.
Remember what this feature is meant for.
It is to make it possible to find  which
changes affected a particular entity.

If one of the changes this finds is a change in which that entity was
moved and not actually altered, so what?  The feature will still do
most of what it is meant to do.  The commit message for that change
will say it was just a reorganization, and the person studying the
code will ignore that change.

  > Furthermore, you have unnamed entities - for example, in GCC machine 
  > descriptions, unnamed define_split constructs.

If there is no way to name these entities, then what do hand-written
GCC change log entries say about them?  Can the script do as well as that?

If it can, it is no worse than what we have now.

                                                    If you want to find past 
  > changes to such a construct, you have to use tools like "git blame", as 
  > there is no possible name to search for.

If that is a problem now, with change logs, it is ok if the problem
persists with the new script -- as long as it does not get worse.

  > Furthermore, as I noted in January, there are cases in glibc where, while 
  > there is arguably a name, it's not a very helpful one - in makefiles, it 
  > can be something like

  > $(addprefix $(objpfx),$(filter-out $(tests-static) 
$(libm-vec-tests),$(tests)))

How have we historically described changes in such entities
in change log files?

  >   I don't think expecting scripts 
  > to do anything sensible in such cases is useful, because even a 
  > human-written ChangeLog entry is extremely unhelpful for understanding 
  > such changes.

Maybe you are right.  Maybe it doesn't matter what the script does for
those screwy entities.

The cases I want this script to fix are those where entities have
meaningful names, and the git commands are sloppy about identifying
which entities are affected by the change.

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