[webkit-dev] Changes to prepare-ChangeLog

[Benjamin Meyer]

On Jul 2, 2009, at 4:07 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.

Indeed, I never manually fill in a changelog and always use the script  
to autofill it from my git patch.  This means that everything in the  
changelog (at least for me) is a duplicate of what is already in the  
rcs which is a violation of the DRY principle.  If we ever move off  
svn I will propose that we should no longer maintain the changelog.   
It is duplicated information and causes update/merge errors/hassle.

-Benjamin Meyer