[ On Tuesday, May 23, 2000 at 15:29:08 (-0400), Laird Nelson wrote: ]
> Subject: Off topic, sort of: best ChangeLog practices?
>
> Various posts here have been tangentially involved with ChangeLogs.
> Emacs has a ChangeLog mode. The free/open source communities seem to
> make great use of these things.
>
> What are they?
"ChangeLog" files are typically the same as what one might get with "cvs
log" (or perhaps "cvs log -l").
In days gone by few people had access to the source repositories (be
they SCCS, RCS, or some other format) other than the primary maintainer.
Indeed some folks simply recorded their changes in a log file and never
kept intermediate revisions of files. In either case folks often found
it was easier/quicker to just distribute these log files, and or some
prettied up copy of "rlog" or "prs" output with a distribution instead
of writing more formal and complete release notes.
However with the proliferation of public access CVS (and other) source
repositories for at least the "freeware" segment I'm hoping to see fewer
and fewer folks distributing ChangeLog files.
If you do use CVS, and you do want to ship ChangeLog files with your
software, you can use Paul Eggert's rcs2log script, a version of which
is distributed with CVS in the contrib directory.
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Secrets of the Weird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
