On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 5:56 AM, Ulrich Mueller <u...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > So the research that needs to be done first is to find out how often > our ChangeLog entries differ from the commit log. If it turns out that > they are identical in 99 % of all cases, then it obviously makes no > sense to maintain the same information in two places, and ChangeLogs > should be abandoned. (For my own commits, I would estimate that > messages are different for 20 % of commits.)
When I do commits the commit message is scripted to be identical to the changelog message. I doubt I have a single commit where they differed, unless I went back to modify a changelog to fix a typo or something. They're all intended to be readable by anybody. > > Only when this has been answered, we should discuss how the > information should be formatted and how users should obtain it. So, this will be on the Council agenda. By all means go out and dig up whatever info you think will be useful for making a decision, but I don't want to put this off hoping that somebody else will do it. I don't think it is essential to determine whether changelog messages are different from commit messages in practice. If a majority of council members disagree we can defer the decision. > Some ideas: No objection to any of your ideas per se, but I don't want to make any of them blockers for a git migration. I think getting off of cvs is orthogonal to improving our documentation and communications. There are a million ways we could be spending our effort on Gentoo, but I don't think that making our commit messages more nicely formatted/etc is something worthy of a rule (ie something all devs are forced to contribute to). 95% of it is noise, so if there is a message that really needs to get out to users it should go into something like a news item that is distributed BEFORE the change is made. If documentation improvements are built into a new echangelog-like tool, I think that will greatly help adoption, but again I don't want to hold up the git migration for this. The git migration has been a moving target forever because there has always been just one more thing that needs to be done, and most who have gotten involved have gotten frustrated/bored/whatever and moved on. How many FOSS projects of our scale are still using cvs anyway? -- Rich
