On 9/16/07, Havoc Pennington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > On 9/15/07, Jaap Haitsma <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Talking to Daniel "Cheese" Siegel we asked ourselves: > > Why do all GNOME projects have a ChangeLog file? > > Isn't it redundant when you just save a commit message. > > > > When I've seen projects just dump CVS or SVN log to ChangeLog, > typically the resulting ChangeLog sucked badly; most commit messages > are not very good, while ChangeLog entries frequently are. Why the > difference? Who knows. It is a real difference whether there's a > logical reason for it or not though.
(snip) > I guess the summary is, the focus should be on whether people write > good change history messages, and maintainers should probably feel > free to use any mechanism that works for them for that. But as soon as > messages start to be useless, like "fixed stuff," "hacked on foo.c," > it's a problem no matter what technology is used to save the messages. This has become a non-issue for Tomboy since we started using MonoDevelop's version control and ChangeLog integration. If you check out this (old) post on Lluis Sanchez's blog [1], you'll see what great ChangeLog/commit integration can look like. Lluis' screenshots [2][3] tell the story better than I can, but basically there is a version control "status" window with a top pane showing modified files (with expandable diffs) and a bottom pane where you enter your changes for each file. This information is consolidated into a well-formatted commit message that is also prepended to an appropriately-located ChangeLog *before* committing. This helps create better history messages because you have the relevant diffs right there with you as you're typing up your messages. And you're not frustrated about wasting time typing in file paths and switching contexts, so you're more likely to take time making nice messages. :-) I know not everybody likes IDEs like MonoDevelop or operating systems like emacs, but I think this is clearly a superior workflow approach that maintains existing GNOME practices. I'm sure this functionality could be put into a standalone tool for everybody to use (command line or otherwise). Cheers, Sandy [1] http://foodformonkeys.blogspot.com/2007/02/more-on-monodevelop-work.html (section titled "Improvements in Version Control") [2] http://bp3.blogger.com/_cHnO0qtZD7s/RcI53XeaPZI/AAAAAAAAAA0/4ofHLVlHQg8/s1600-h/CapturaCSharpBindingStatus.png [3] http://bp0.blogger.com/_cHnO0qtZD7s/RcI8jneaPaI/AAAAAAAAAA8/cuEUIzyYwRQ/s1600-h/CapturaCommitFiles.png _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
