Re: changesets that remove ChangeLog from distribution tarballs

[Rik]

On 06/09/2011 11:16 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> The following changesets
> 
>   http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/a87052630372
>   http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/ee3a60f254e1
> 
> remove the generated ChangeLog file from the distribution and also
> remove it on distclean.  I don't think that's what we want to do.  The
> generated ChangeLog file should be in the tar.gz file that we
> distribute so that people without access to the mercurial archive can
> still see a log of the changes from one distribution to the next.  So
> I think these two changesets should be backed out.  Or am I missing
> something?
The stable/default split was past the point where we abandoned ChangeLog
files in favor of Mercurial logs + a formatting script.  The old ChangeLogs
are distributed in the tarball in the directory OLD-ChangeLogs.  The
toplevel Makefile.am includes a rule for generating a single ChangeLog file
for events past 2011/04/19.  The auto-generated file's last line is a
pointer to the OLD-ChangeLogs directory for those who need to see more.
This auto-generated ChangeLog file is included in EXTRA_DIST so it also
gets distributed.

The second changeset just added the auto-generated ChangeLog to those files
removed by the distclean target since there should be a way to get a clean
build tree.

Perhaps our conversion to a new ChangeLog structure deserves another note
in the NEWS file?

--Rik
> 
> jwe
>