Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 release branch created!

Simon Marchi
2018-02-02T16:27:56Z

On 2018-02-02 10:53, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> Well, if it were me, I would stop using ChangeLog files with
> immediate effect.
>
> The purpose of ChangeLog files, as I understand it, is to describe
> the "what changed", and is aimed at people who download a given
> release and want to know what changed (because they do not have
> access to the version control information).
>
> While the above might have been essential 20 or 25 years ago,
> it is trivial for anyone today to have access to the change
> history of our program. Two options:
> - git clone our public repository; or...
> - ... if they don't want to use git, they can use the gitweb
> interface.
>
> I think that this is an acceptable way for us to provide the log
> of changes that were made.
>
> Currently, the situation is that we all pay a price in term of time
> wasted populating those files, and when we add the time collectively
> spent on those, I cannot imagine the few people's convenience would
> be worth that much effort.
>
> I vote for we stop using those ChangeLog files right now. We can
> still have them as part of the ChangeLog if people want -- although,
> I am also open to considering the pros and cons of keeping it,
> but I think they might not be worth the investiment either.

I agree about the time consumed producing ChangeLog entries. I have to
admit that it sometimes discourages me to do structural changes that
would affect a lot files/functions. I also feel like I'm filling some
administrative paperwork, which is not my favorite way of spending my
time.

Maintaining an internal port of GDB, one use I have for the ChangeLog is
to find what commit removed a given function. Let's say I rebase our
code and find out a function we use was removed, grepping for that
function would find the ChangeLog entry, leading me to the commit, which
helps in fixing the code. However, I recently discovered "git blame
--reverse", which allows to ask git about which commit removed a
particular line. So the ChangeLog is not really required for that use
case.

Since with git the whole history is available offline, I think the
usefulness of this kind of ChangeLogs is not as big as it used to be.

To be fair I'll also state a pro I see for the ChangeLog. When I write
the ChangeLog entry, it makes me look at my change a last time in
details and sometimes find some additional issues I might not have found
otherwise.

It might be worth starting a new thread to get the attention of
everybody to discuss this issue.

Simon