Re: [PATCH] sim: switch to autogenerated ChangeLog files

[Christian Biesinger via Gdb-patches <gdb-patches@sourceware.org>]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 6:10 PM Luis Machado via Gdb-patches
<gdb-patches@sourceware.org> wrote:
>
> On 1/11/21 2:00 PM, Simon Marchi via Gdb-patches wrote:
> > On 2021-01-11 6:05 a.m., Andrew Burgess wrote:
> >> I think sim/ should follow the same policy as gdb/ for now.  Do feel
> >> free to raise this as a suggestion for gdb/ in general though, it
> >> would be an interesting conversation to observe.
> >
> > Last time I tried the gitlog-to-changelog script on GDB, it produced
> > horrible results.  Probably because it was not designed for C++.
> >
> > Making a script to produce ChangeLogs for C code is already very
> > difficult, making it work with good results for C++ would be even
> > worst.  And most importantly, I think it would be wasted development
> > time.
> >
> > My opinion is that we should either keep hand-written ChangeLogs, or
> > admit that ChangeLogs are not useful and get rid of them altogether
> > (and you know which side I lean towards).  But auto-generating
> > ChangeLogs, other than allowing to check the "we have ChangeLog" box,
> > doesn't produce anything useful.
>
> Ever since we moved binutils-gdb to git, ChangeLog's started to feel
> like a waste of time. Now, with broader use of C++, it is even worse. It
> makes things more verbose and harder for tools to find the right scope
> (is the change in a function? A class? A member function?). And the
> limit of 80 columns adds to that burden, since we need to watch out for
> the length of the line. It feels like a puzzle sometimes.
>
> "git log" produces very useful information, and we make the commit
> messages very verbose (more than other projects) so developers can have
> a pretty good idea of what has changed and why.
>
> I'm strongly in favor of dropping ChangeLog's from GDB.

I would love this as well.

There was some discussion almost a year ago in a thread titled "Using
the vcs_to_changelog.py script"
(https://sourceware.org/pipermail/gdb-patches/2020-February/165728.html)

Christian