Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 03/07/2016 10:46 PM, Nikolaus Rath wrote:

> When I submitted my first Emacs patch, I was astonished when I was asked
> to re-submit with my commit message essentially duplicated in the
> ChangeLog.

Was your commit message already written in ChangeLog format?

> How can it be an increased burden if reviewers have to review just one
> thing (the commit message) instead of two (commit message and
> ChangeLog)?

Eli was stating something more general, but to get into specifics: 
often, I only need to read the patch's introduction (high-level 
description), and its ChangeLog entry, to understand it well enough.

A diff contains the same information, but it's usually longer, could be 
harder to read, and often you don't see right away which function a 
given change is being changed, especially if the function is long, and 
the change is right in the middle of it (though that can be alleviated 
with language-specific diff options).

And then, I can look through the diff, compare it against the ChangeLog, 
and see if there are any discrepancies. So the odds of getting some 
unrelated changes (or missing some related ones) is lower.