Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Ted.

On Wed, Jul 06, 2016 at 10:20:07AM -0400, Ted Zlatanov wrote:
> On Sun, 06 Mar 2016 13:52:04 -0800 John Wiegley <address@hidden> wrote: 

[ .... ]

> But Emacs doesn't have a pull request contribution system, which makes
> it hard to review things before they go in, so contributors must know
> and follow the right format at all times. It's a pain.

> So I would suggest moving to a pull request system, where code review
> from a second contributor is required to merge any non-trivial code
> (exceptions should be granted based on years contributing to Emacs).
> That also gives *everyone* the opportunity to comment on the code before
> it's merged, instead of post-facto. Clearly services such as Github and
> BitBucket and many others have been offering this functionality for a
> while with good results.

> A big advantage of pull requests is that they can group commits, so each
> commit doesn't need the level of detail it does today, and so the
> evolution of the work is visible to a reviewer.

I don't know exactly what is meant by "pull request" and "pull request
system".  I don't think they are established terms.

The term seems to imply that instead of a contributor pushing a change
from his machine to a central repository, some specially authorised
authority would pull the change from the contributor's machine.  This
would seem to imply every contributor needing to set up an scp daemon on
his local machine, which doesn't feel like a Good Thing.

Please explain "pull request\( system\)?" more precisely.

Thanks!

> Then ChangeLogs become simply documentation for the merged code,
> together with actual docs and other notes that are needed. The pull
> request system can later provide *everything* that a ChangeLog could,
> and more (such as better searching and cross-referencing) so in the long
> term the ChangeLog can go away.

> Ted

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).