Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?

[Paul Eggert]

On 03/09/2016 12:21 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> it's fortress -- if you dismantle one of its bastions, the others
> will soon fall as well.

It's not a fortress, as is demonstrated in other GNU projects. For 
example, here are the last three commit messages for coreutils, which 
has been using the proposed approach since 2008. These commit messages 
are just as good as what we typically see for Emacs. Maybe better. I'm 
sure we can improve the quality of Emacs commit messages, but putting 
them into ChangeLog files is not necessary or even all that helpful for 
doing so.

  commit e735d417fb2e5c7427b3622f2a78e65e450b49a8
  Author: Eric Blake <address@hidden>
  Date:   Tue Mar 8 16:01:34 2016 -0700

      build: update gnulib submodule to latest

      Mainly for:
      *bdb72bc6 set-permissions: fix compilation on Cygwin

      * bootstrap: Sync with gnulib.
      * gl/lib/regcomp.c.diff: Regenerate against latest gnulib.

  commit 68ede201e8890b757aa37d72ce4dca872155f7db
  Author: Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
  Date:   Sun Mar 6 16:38:01 2016 -0800

      tests: avoid false-failure of split/filter.sh on XFS

      * tests/split/filter.sh: Use OFF_T_MAX-1 rather than OFF_T_MAX
      as the size of a test file, to avoid false failure on an XFS file
      system (or any file system permitting a file of size OFF_T_MAX).
      Reported as http://bugs.gnu.org/22931

  commit 6475c514550bc1fbdb3410485312211726765798
  Author: Eric Blake <address@hidden>
  Date:   Fri Mar 4 09:47:33 2016 -0700

      test: Document that -a and -o are undesirable

      POSIX recommends avoiding -a and -o, for good reason.
      src/test.c (usage): Mention that inherent ambiguities exist with
      binary -a and -o.
      Problem reported by Martin Gebert in: http://bugs.gnu.org/22909