[webkit-dev] ChangeLog

[Joe Mason]

Darin Adler wrote:
> My experience on other projects that don’t use ChangeLog is that many 
> check-ins don’t have clear comments or descriptions, and the fact that 
> these are missing is considerably easier to overlook. Source code 
> control comments can be tricky if you can never delete or edit them.

We already have a rigorous review process that checks for good check-in 
descriptions, though.  Every check-in I've looked at has a description 
identical to its ChangeLog entry - isn't that the policy?

Being able to edit source control comments is a good point.  You can 
edit them with git, although then everyone who pulls from the edited 
repository needs to use a special command to deal with the changed 
history, so it should be used sparingly.  I don't know if this is 
possible for other distributed vcs's.

> I like a discipline that results in good comments about changes, and 
> ones that are present even outside the source code control system. I 
> often quickly find information about changes made long ago by searching 
> change logs and doing even simple searches using the other tools 
> available are difficult. For one thing most of them are client-server 
> tools while ChangeLog is entirely local.

Switching to a vcs that has local workspaces (like git) will take care 
of this worry, and have many other benefits besides.

Even if sticking with svn, you just need to run svn2cl once when you 
update to get a local copy of the changelog.

> Someone who thinks an automatically-generated ChangeLog would work well 
> could get that working to demonstrate how well it works.

I'd have a sample up already, but I don't have admin access to our server...

Joe