On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 12:17 -0400, Dan Winship wrote: 
> Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Dan Winship <[email protected]> wrote:
> > [...]
> >> So, actually, what exactly IS the use case of ChangeLog if there is git
> >> history on one end and NEWS on the other? Who are the people who need
> >> more information than NEWS gives, but who would not want tSysadmins, 
> >> Package maintainersmo actually
> >> check out the source tree, and what information, exactly, do they need?
> > 
> > Generally its the tarball that is published and trusted, not the git 
> > repository.
> > 
> > The ChangeLog comes with the published tarball like an exported history,
> > for the use of anyone who receives the tarball (the NEWS is just a quick
> > resume of what happened in a release).
> 
> But that doesn't answer the question. Who are these people who read
> ChangeLog, and what is it that they're doing with it, such that NEWS is
> too brief, but a fully-VCS-ed source tree is unnecessary.
> 
> Eg, this subthread started when Alex suggested that we needed to put the
> names of all modified files into each ChangeLog entry. It seems to me
> that anyone who cares exactly which files got modified by a particular
> change is going to want to see the actual diff very soon after, and so
> those people are not actually part of the don't-need-a-full-checkout use
> case.
> 
> But that's just a gut feeling and maybe it's wrong. The point is,
> ChangeLogs were invented back when RCS-files-on-an-NFS-server was the
> pinnacle of version control technology, and maybe what was most useful
> then isn't what's most useful now.

Sysadmins and they take the decision if it worth an update/upgrade or
when they should do it.

If we ask people to read ChangeLogs from git, I wonder why do we bother
in releasing tarballs when they could them from the repository also? (in
the sense you can get a tar.gz/tar.bz2, they are tagged, etc.)

-- 
Germán Póo-Caamaño
Concepción - Chile
http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/
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