Does anyone feel that the ChangeLog-branches directories distributed
with Wget are desirable or necessary? These side ChangeLogs are
accumulating and they *repeat* ChangeLog text many times over!
For example, the 1.8, 1.9, and 1.10 branch changelogs have a lot of
overlapping contents. The src/ChangeLog-branches directory on the
trunk contains 1.5M of text -- compared to the 284K "real" ChangeLog
with useful data.
ChangeLog-branches were introduced and championed by Dan Harkless. To
avoid misrepresenting his position, I will reproduce it here in its
entirety, copied from ChangeLog.README:
In addition, you'll notice the ChangeLog-branches directories.
In late 2000, time constraints delayed the release of Wget 1.6. While
it was awaiting release, people had new features and other changes they
wanted added to the CVS archive, but these were deemed not safe to
introduce just before a release.
The solution was to split the stable 1.6 off onto its own branch, while
free-wheeling development continued on the main branch (whose version
was changed from 1.5.3+dev to 1.7-dev).
Unfortunately it's difficult to portray this branched development in the
flat ChangeLog file. Either you include 1.6-branch changes in the
1.7-branch ChangeLog, in which case it becomes impossible to tell what
release version a given change first went into Wget, just judging by
date and position in the ChangeLog, or you omit all 1.6-branch changes
from the 1.7-branch ChangeLog, in which case all evidence of the
existence of 1.6 (and further information about that branch) disappears
from future versions of Wget.
The solution that was decided upon was to make a subdirectory called
ChangeLog-branches adjacent to each ChangeLog file. Inside is the
corresponding ChangeLog from the most recent release on the stable
branch (e.g. 1.6_branch.ChangeLog). This way, no information is lost
and there's no misleading information in the ChangeLog.
I have never seen such a directory in another software project. Does
anyone feel that there is useful value to the ChangeLog-branches
directories?
