Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Nikolaus Rath <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mar 07 2016, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> 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.
>>
>> I can't remember ever asking this kind of duplication.  We used to
>> duplicate the ChangeLog-info in the ChangeLog file and in the commit
>> message (tho we stopped doing it a year ago), but we never asked for it
>> to be duplicated in the email messages that submits a patch.
>>
>> So I have the impression that I'm misunderstanding you.  Could you
>> describe more precisely the kind of duplication you're talking about?
>
> No, you understood me correctly. However, I've just looked this up again
> and it turns out I was actually submitting a patch to Gnus, not
> Emacs. It was eventually committed by Eric Abrahamsen to the Gnus git
> repo, who first asked me to re-submit my patch with a commit message
> that was formatted like a Changelog entry, and to duplicate the message
> in the ChangeLog itself. It seemed to me that he considered that a
> questionable practice himself, but said it was obligatory because Gnus
> closely followed the Emacs standards here.
>
>
> Unfortunately that discussion never made it into the bug
> (http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20956), so I'm
> paraphrasing from memory. But I'm pretty sure I'm remembering correctly,
> because I was so surprised by this.

Not duplicating it in the email, just commit message + ChangeLog
duplication. This may be getting conflated with me asking for the commit
to be emailed as a git-format-patch attachment, which was just because I
was lazy (and it also preserves the author/committer distinction).

But yes, Gnus was doing the ChangeLog dance right up until the repo
merged with Emacs -- I pushed a couple of changes there just before
that, neglecting to include the ChangeLog, and someone went and cleaned
up after me. Embarrassing.