I think using xml is very impractical , commit messages are intended to be
written and consumed by humans; generating, mixing and validating machine
friendly content (in this case xml) with taht it's not a good idea. We can use
a more simple aproach like adding a special keyword that identifies a commit
message sentence as a potential changelog message. For example:
- Content
- Stop mixing unicode and ANSI strings (@notepad)
- Don't dereference NULL pointers (b:9...@user32)
- More content
This content can then be parsed with a simple regular expression to auto
generate the changelog as follows:
- Notepad
- Stop mixing unicode and ANSI strings (GED) (rev 123-3/07/2009)
USER32
- (BugFix see 999), Don't dereference NULL pointers (GED) (rev123-3/07/2009)
Regards,
/Marc
From: Ged
Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 3:30 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [ros-dev] Commit log
I think we all agree that the process of filling out a changelog is a task we
would rather avoid.
Collibri has made some efforts to alleviate this and despite getting some good
results we're also seeing a lot of information which isn't changelog oriented.
This now leaves us with a new problem of having to manually go through data
output from Collibri's tool and reformat it.
This is arguably more time consuming than the original method and isn't working
for us in its current form.
The current problem with this method is that a commit log is not a changelog
and getting something which can be classed as a changelog from this without
human intervention is an impossible task. There are also some people who would
rather write their own changelog instead of allowing a tool to generate it for
you.
The problem as I see it is two fold :
- Commit messages generally contain cryptic message, humour, idioms
and frustration
- Patches can spread over a wide range of modules making it difficult
to insert them into the correct position in the changelog.
A possible solution to this is to wrap up a changelog in XML elements. Such a
commit log would be as follows :
......................................................................................................
- Stop mixing unicode and ANSI strings
- Don't dereference NULL pointers
<changelog>
<notepad>Converted the application to Unicode</notepad>
<user32>Fixed a crash highlighted via adobe acrobat</user32>
</changelog>
......................................................................................................
This will allow anyone who wants to have a changelog autogenerated at release
time to take advantage and anyone who wants to do their own to ignore it.
The problem with this method lies in getting the XML tags correct.
Anyone have any other ideas?
Ged.
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