Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 03/08/2016 05:45 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> You (and some others) say the format and the content in the log
> messages are important, and I agree.  But if we do care about them,
> how can we NOT clean them up?  Having them in their current state
> means they cannot be trusted, which is worse than not having them at
> all.

That's true. But my motivation for using ChangeLogs stems from having 
people describe their changes in a strict format. If someone writes a 
wrong name or omits the "copyright-exempt" header, I could live with that.

We should find out how much it is of a problem, though, legally speaking.

> > Has the current experiment really sucked too much energy from anyone, aside 
> > from the implementors?
>
> Why do you think Glenn gave up?

My bad. All right, Glenn gave up fixing errors. Isn't that because 
people made too much mistakes, and didn't bother to fix them?

Even if we transition to the previous system, it will need the same 
people to fix their errors.

> > Not in my experience either. I've still had collisions, and even when 
> > git-merge-changelog resolved them, it often put my entry in the middle of the 
> > file, whereas I usually needed it to be at the top. Leading to extra manual 
> > labor.
>
> That extra manual labor is very small, and it's still a rare case to
> have that.  A small price to pay for a clean and reliable solution.

It's a bit hard to remember now, but I think I had to move my entry to 
the top more often than not. So, not a rare case.

> > It was longer for me. But either way, it's more hassle for a random contributor 
> > than the current system.
>
> The current system is much more hassle for non-random contributors, so
> much so that we risk losing them, something we cannot afford.

Will someone decide to stop contributing to Emacs because our Change Log 
entries contain mistakes? That doesn't sound very plausible.