Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Richard Stallman]

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  > Here is a simple example of where the ChangeLog is far more clear then
  > the diff, the diff says that get-buffer-window-list change, but that
  > isn't the case.

If the identification of entities changed, given by VCS tools,
is erroneous, using that instead of listing the entities in the history
is a non-starter.

But this is just a bug.  If we fix it, it will become a thing of the
past.  Joseph, would you like to fix it?

  > > Perhaps I misread the text from the man page when I read it before.
  > > What is the default regexp, and how is it used?

  > It's a line beginning with a letter, underscore or $, according to the 
  > manpage.

If I understand this, it will cause trouble for C.
In C, this will cause return-type lines to be taken for entity names.

int
foobar ()

->

long
foobar ()

Preprocessor conditionals will cause confusion, and some other directives too.

So will strings that are split across lines with \n -- in some cases.

Smarter code to find and list entities could overcome these problems.
Joseph, would you like to write that?

With that done, we could mechanically determine which entities changed
from the diff itself.  We would not need to write their names in the
history in order to HAVE a list of the entities affected by each
change.

There would remain the question of whether the brief descriptions of
the changes in particular entities are important to have in the
history.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See https://stallman.org/skype.html.