Re: Re: A request: Moving away from ChangeLog

[Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com>]

Hi Ben,

On May 21, 2010, at 3:01 PM, Ben Finney wrote:

> Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On May 21, 2010, at 11:41 AM, John Wiegley wrote:
>>> This makes it trivial to build ChangeLog entries for a range of
>>> commits, suitable for submission to Emacs. It may need a bit more
>>> work to be production-ready, but it can already produce a ChangeLog
>>> for all of org-mode.
> […]
>
>> If this works, lets stop writing ChangeLog.
>
> This is a great improvement.
>
> It seems worth pointing out explicitly, though: Eliminating a
> manually-maintained ChangeLog doesn't obviate the need for a ChangeLog
> (or the equivalent) in the distributed source.
>
> This is because the copyright holders license their works under the
> GPLv2, and §2.a of those terms requires the work to include dated  
> notice
> of all modifications made to the work. This is conventionally  
> understood
> to be most directly satisfied by a ChangeLog in the distributed source
> for the work.

I did not know this, thank you for making me aware of it.

- Carsten

>
> Generating that file automatically from the VCS commit messages, at  
> the
> time a source release is packaged, is a good use of the VCS.
>
>> This will make most merges working without hickups, finally.  And it
>> will make us, hopefully, write better commit messages.
>
> Indeed. Having one canonical location for a piece of information, with
> every other instance of it derived from that location, can help reduce
> the burden of recording that information.
>
> -- 
> \       “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the  
> death |
>  `\     your right to say it.” —Evelyn Beatrice Hall, _The Friends  
> of |
> _o__)                                                  Voltaire_,  
> 1906 |
> Ben Finney
>
>
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- Carsten