Re: A request: Moving away from ChangeLog

[Ben Finney <ben+emacs@benfinney.id.au>]

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.

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