Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2016 19:44:47 +0200
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> 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.

Not just legal aspect are at stake.  I tried to explain that in one of
my previous messages.

> >> 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.

It is easy to ask someone to fix a mistake in a file and push the
change.  With the current system, fixing mistakes requires a much more
complex procedure, and also screws up merges to master.

> > 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.

When people like Glenn give up in despair, I think the danger is real.
IME, it's hard to be part of a project that ignores repeated requests
to fix something you believe must be fixed.