Hi all, On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 08:42:18PM +0200, ott wrote: > I've been taking care of the changelog since Sanna left. The recent > outage of the svn-commits mailing list made me realise just how much > time I have been wasting trying to understand commits and summarising > them into pithy newsbites (complete with crossreferencing them to the > issue tracker). Having two changelogs just makes this worse, and most > of the devs don't seem to think the changelog is of any value. > > I suggest that people either be more conscientious in adding changes > to the changelog, that we move to an automatic system that extracts > the SVN comments and dumps them into a changes file with a timestamp, > or that the changelog be abandoned altogether.
Count me in those finding the changelog to be a very valuable resource. Other people have also thought about automatic generation of "changes" documents. This can be seen as a part of a more complete "Version Description Document" (aka. VDD), which would also include issues still open (something which was also done manually for 1.0), and all sorts of useful informations possible to extract when the versionning system is coupled to the issue-tracking system. Here enters scmbug[1], whose primary task is to make the link between versionning and bugtracking, so that work on a bug committed in SVN[2] gets automatically recorded into the matching bugreport. Work has also started on VDD generation. It still has some rough edges (see the bunch of reports/patches/suggestions I have submitted on it after testing it at work), and would require integrating with the Savane bug-tracking system used at Gna! (most surely including cooperating with the savane devteam to add necessary hooks), but it is surely one possibility to consider - and at least one on which work and thought has already been done. [1] http://freshmeat.net/projects/scmbug/ [2] did I say a big "Thanks!" to those of you who migrated the history ? oh damn... well, consider this done now ;) Best regards, -- Yann Dirson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Debian-related: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Support Debian GNU/Linux: | Freedom, Power, Stability, Gratis http://ydirson.free.fr/ | Check <http://www.debian.org/>
