On Mar 21, 2012, at 3:14 PM, Dirk Pranke wrote:

> I think this is a reasonable suggestion, but I don't agree with it :).
> I would prefer that we try to get good changelogs through culture and
> convention rather than through good tooling.
> 
> This is of course based on my experience in my changes and the types
> of changes I review, but I personally find what value there is at all
> in ChangeLogs in the paragraphs at the top of the change, and I find
> the lists of changed files and to be distracting noise far more often
> than not. (Perhaps things are different in changes to the core
> rendering code than changes to tooling and test code).

I find the comments useful, even for scripts. ChangeLogs for tests are often 
more mundane.

My particular interest is the Web Inspector, which I follow by watching bugs 
and commits. Often I find myself asking "why?" or "what does this do?" when 
perusing the commits. It sometimes isn't very obvious and a nice concise 
description in the ChangeLog would help. This is even more important when folks 
are separated by timezones or are not easy to reach for explanation.

They also provide insight when looking back on changes from months or years ago 
when tracking down a regression.

> I think it is difficult to say what a "good" changelog is an any sort
> of algorithmic sense, and trying to implement something that would be
> done programmatically will be more annoying than useful (even if it
> means that I just have to delete a bunch of "OOPS" lines).


It would be difficult to make the tool smart. I merely looking for reminder to 
push folks to describe their changes in some fashion, not a analytical tool 
parsing for good vs bad.

— Timothy Hatcher

_______________________________________________
webkit-dev mailing list
webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org
http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev

Reply via email to