[webkit-dev] Changes to prepare-ChangeLog

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Jul 2, 2009, at 1:07 AM, Mike Hommey wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 01:01:09AM -0700, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org 
> > wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 12:50 AM, Mike Hommey<mh 
>> +webkit at glandium.org> wrote:
>>> I've always wondered, in the days of atomic commits and advanced  
>>> SCM, why
>>> fill changelogs at all ? Except for CVS, RCS or SCCS, any SCM  
>>> already
>>> stores the log of changes. Keeping a Changelog in the SCM is both a
>>> duplication of information and a stick to beat yourself when you
>>> cherry-pick or revert changes, or merge branches.
>>
>> When I've ask similar questions in the past, I've been told:
>>
>> 1) Changelogs are easier to search / archive / fix up than commit  
>> log messages.
>
> For search and archive, nothing prevents you to generate ChangeLogs  
> for
> that purpose.
>
>> 2) We can review the Changelog messages using bugzilla's review
>> system, but it's harder to review the commit log message.
>
> Not if the patch contains the commit message in its header, like git
> or mercurial do. Creating a script for svn, if it doesn't already  
> exist,
> wouldn't be too hard, too.

With SVN at least, it's a lot faster and easier to do a text search on  
the ChangeLog than to retrieve and search the commit log history.  
Searching the actual commit logs is very slow online and doesn't work  
at all offline. The ChangeLog also ends up in static tarball drops,  
which is useful to people getting those.

Regards,
Maciej