Re: A request: Moving away from ChangeLog

[Christian Egli <christian.egli@sbszh.ch>]

Hi all

John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> writes:

> The Emacs ChangeLog is a file which predates the existence of freely
> available, project-wide version control. It was a way to see, in one
> place, the stream of changes occurring in a project -- something which
> RCS could not do for you.

The only problem is that we need to have a Changelog for upstream, i.e.
Emacs.

> However, in this modern era of project-wide, atomic commits, the
> ChangeLog is not only an archaism, but is a continuous source of merge
> conflicts. For example, when I reverted Russell's latest change -- a
> one-liner that was minor in the extreme -- I had to do with a merge
> conflict in lisp/ChangeLog.

If the real problem you're trying to solve is the merge conflicts you
get with the Changelog files then the solution might be Bruno Haible’s
git merge driver for GNU-style ChangeLog files[1] (available in gnulib[2]).

Automatic generation of the Changelog file sounds like a fine solution
and I'm all for it, but when it comes down to the actual requirements of
the Changelog (such as file and especially function names) things don't
look that rosy anymore (doesn't work outside of Emacs, can no longer use
M-x add-change-log-entry, etc).

So before pouring out the baby with the bathwater maybe we should at
least try if the git merge driver solves the main problem we have with
the Changelog files.  

Thanks
Christian

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-gnulib@gnu.org/msg09183.html
[2]  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=blob;f=lib/git-merge-changelog.c

-- 
Christian Egli
Swiss Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Print Disabled
Grubenstrasse 12, CH-8045 Zürich, Switzerland