Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] GDB 8.1 release branch created!

Eli Zaretskii
2018-02-01T17:33:53Z

> From: Yao Qi <qiyaoltc@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2018 16:51:36 +0000
> Cc: Simon Marchi <simon.marchi@ericsson.com>, GDB Patches <gdb-patches@sourceware.org>
>
> On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 4:27 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the commit log entry supposed
> > to have the same text as the ChangeLog for that change?
>
> My understanding is that ChangeLog entry should be copied at the end
> of commit log

I believe I did that, except that I moved the motivation for the
change before the ChangeLog header, as it belongs to the preamble of
the Git log. (In ChangeLog, there's no subdivision of the entry.)

> > And what's wrong with having error messages in ChangeLog's, anyway?
>
> Each entry in ChangeLog describes the changes to the code,
> https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Change-Log-Concepts
> IMO, error messages are out of the scope of what ChangeLog is intended
> to describe.

This is changing, and some GNU projects already do it differently. I
believe the next version of standards.texi will change the
recommendations to be more lax. And using different style for each
project is a pain. Is GDB really so rigid as to not tolerate this?

Please note that the error message I cited is just part of the
motivation for the change, so we are really talking about including
the motivation in the ChangeLog.

> Also, I've never seen such ChangeLog entry (with error messages)
> before.

That's not necessarily a reason for rejecting such entries.

So: what is the project's take on this, if there is one?