Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?

[Paul Eggert]

>   3. We need a convenient way to both create and access this information. 

On 03/09/2016 10:41 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Paul Eggert
> >
> > The coreutils-like approach that I recently proposed should satisfy
> > requirements (2) through (7).  See:
> >
> > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-03/msg00391.html
> It doesn't satisfy (3).

Sure it does. There are lots of ways to look at Git logs, ranging from 
plain "git log" through VC commands through running "make gen-ChangeLog" 
and looking at the resulting ChangeLog file.

One old-fashioned example: on my 6-year-old desktop it takes 2.3 seconds 
to generate the entire log of all 125,294 commits to the Emacs 
repository's main branch, using plain "git log". This generates a 37 MB 
file that Emacs can easily load and I can quickly search through 
interactively, or apply 'grep' to, or whatever. It's not a problem.

When Emacs was first developed, this sort of approach would have been 
prohibitively expensive. Nowadays it's no big deal.

As for convenient way to create the information, that's trivial: just 
put it into the commit message. This has long been common practice with 
Emacs.

> it requires the amendments to be
> in a form that is tedious to produce and error-prone.

It's not that bad, and it's good enough. True, it will discourage minor 
tidying-up of old entries (reindenting and the like), but that's a good 
thing. We should be spending our scarce development resources in more 
important areas.