On Sep 11, 2007, at 2:18 AM, William Uther wrote:
On 10/09/2007, at 7:49 PM, Thomas Keller wrote:
Hi all!
I've noticed that the changelog some people use for monotone is not
quite "GNU-style". I'm sure you all hacked stuff longer than me,
so you
can correct me at any time, but aren't we forced to use some kind of
GNU-style syntax to make it easier to create a ChangeLog file
afterwards
(for whatever distributions need that)? If not, everybody is - of
course
- free to use whatever format they do like.
I don't like to start a bikeshed discussion here, I just want to be
clear. I think it would also be a good idea to include the rules of
whatever consense we find here in HACKING.
I think including the rules in HACKING would be a good idea.
Out of interest, who actually converts log messages directly to
change logs? I would
have thought that most people who distribute Monotone would find
the more abstract
changes described in the NEWS file more relevant.
Indeed. Personally I have never found ChangeLogs that useful *if* I
can resort to the development repository to look for the information
I need. And in the case of Monotone it's clear that doing that is
possible :-) Browsing through the repository archives is usually
easier, more descriptive and far more accurate than what a ChangeLog
can say.
For packagers (at least for me, again ;-) the NEWS files are much
more useful than ChangeLogs because you can quickly get an idea of
the most important changes between releases. The exact changes to
files is irrelevant, unless you are looking for a specific bug fix
for example. (And even in this last case, ChangeLogs are annoying
because the information may be spread among multiple entries making
it difficult to grasp what happened except for people very familiar
with the code.)
I'd vote for ditching ChangeLog-style commit messages in favor of
more descriptive ones (using the approach of a "subject line" at the
beginning and a large description in the subsequent paragraphs).
Why? First of all, Monotone already records the exact changes to the
files, and mtn log will tell you which of them were modified, added,
removed, etc. There is no need to repeat that in the message. And
second, this can prevent committing unrelated changes in a single
commit. Using a ChangeLog approach, it is often very tempting to
write a message as:
* a.cc, b.cc: Did blah, blah, blah.
* z.cc: Fixed an unrelated typo.
This commit would be conceptually incorrect because it's doing two
things at the same time. Using ChangeLog-style messages seems to
encourage this approach. Using plain text messages will make one
think twice before doing that, because he'll have to explain *why* he
is committing that at once.
Cheers,
--
Julio M. Merino Vidal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
_______________________________________________
Monotone-devel mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/monotone-devel
