Re: ChangeLogs

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Jan-2009, Thomas Weber wrote:

| Okay, different proposal: how about we split the changelogs after a new
| release?
| 
| That is, we don't keep a current changelog but generate it at "make
| dist" time, say "ChangeLog-3.1.52". That is then added to the repository
| (or appended to the normal ChangeLog).

If we generate ChangeLog files automatically, I wasn't planning to try
to keep them in the Mercuial archive at all.  Or, as you suggest, we
could split them periodically if there is some need to do that (say
the generated file is large, and it would be useful to start fresh).
But generating a new file at each snapshot or seems too often to me

| Spelling or errors could then be
| corrected (as separate Changesets), but we wouldn't touch that file for
| normal changes.

In the mean time, where would that information be stored?  Fixing
spelling errors would be fairly easy, but I supect we would not
remember to fix more serious problems like missing information.
Probably it doesn't really matter too much anyway.  It's just the
ChangeLog...

Also, I think it is important for the "make dist" target to do everything
automatically.  Hand-editing files for a release is just plain
inconvenient (and probably unreliable).

Maybe others feel differently about it, but I'd rather not be doing

  make dist
  untar
  edit
  tar
  compress

or even to have to remember to do

  make ChangeLog
  edit
  make dist

jwe