Re: changesets that remove ChangeLog from distribution tarballs

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Jun-2011, Rik wrote:

| 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.

OK, I misunderstood.

| 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.

Since the top-level generated ChangeLog file is part of a tar file
distribution, it should not be removed by distclean.  It could be
removed by maintainer-clean.  The same thing applies to other
generated files that are distributed in the tar.gz files.  I made this
change:

http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/0fe2eb81e6d0

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

OK, I added this note:

 ** ChangeLog files in the Octave sources are no longer maintained
    by hand.  Instead, there is a single ChangeLog file generated from
    the Mercurial version control commit messages.  Older ChangeLog
    information can be found in the etc/OLD-ChangeLogs directory in the
    source distribution.

Thanks,

jwe