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Re: ChangeLogs


From: Daniel J Sebald
Subject: Re: ChangeLogs
Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:13:36 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041020

Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 5:32 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:

On  5-Jan-2009, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| Applied.

Thanks for applying this change.

It still seems confusing to me that you leave the ChangeLog entry
alone when applying patches.  If I do "hg log" now, I see

changeset:   8444:c3ac9f2772cd
tag:         tip
user:        Thorsten Meyer <address@hidden>
date:        Mon Jan 05 10:54:22 2009 +0100
summary:     do not eat white space within @example environments of docstrings

at the top, but the ChangeLog entry for this change does not have a
Jan 5 date.  Instead, it has a 2008-11-07 date.  If I were looking at
this ChangeLog entry and wanted to find the corresponding changeset,
the date for the ChangeLog entry would not help me find the changeset.
This is why I think we should revise the date of the ChangeLog entry
when checking in changes so that new ChangeLog entries should always
appear at the top of the ChangeLog file.



Sorry, I didn't notice the changelog entry didn't go on top of the
file. I do agree that it always should. We should note this in
contrib.txi. Mea culpa.

This is the one disadvantage of putting ChangeLog hunks in the patch file.  
They are almost always rejected because some other entry has already been 
placed at the top.  Anyone know of a command line switch to make diff force the 
hunk to be at the top when patched?

The patch date should be the date the patch was applied, not the date it was 
created, in my opinion.


Or, we should simply decide to do away with ChangeLog files entirely.
But if we do that, I think we should put much more complete commit
messages in the mercurial log files, and we should agree on a common
style for the commit messages.

A few nice things about ChangeLogs:

1) Legacy and consistency across projects.  I go from one bundled program to 
the next and see ChangeLog, INSTALL, README, and I almost immediately know what 
to do.

2) ChangeLog can be quickly grepped or searched.  Can source control log 
entries be searched as quickly?

3) Contributors who don't check in stuff can place a ChangeLog entry as a hunk 
in the patch file.

Dan


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