Re: [non-stop] 01/10 Add "executing" property

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:20:50 -0400
> From: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>
> Cc: pedro@codesourcery.com, gdb-patches@sourceware.org
> 
> > Well, "Makefile.in (foo): Update." doesn't give any idea WHAT was
> > done, it only says WHERE it was done.
> 
> Actually, it does, at least as far I what I want to know (I want to
> know that the author did an update of the Makefile rules).

That's exactly what "cvs log" tells you as well.

> I don't remember checking exactly what dependencies were added or
> removed, but I don't mind using CVS for that.

It's a pain to do this with CVS, at least in the situations I have in
mind.  Imagine that you need to find all the changes in a certain part
of a specific rule since a very old version.  Perhaps you wonder why
that part of the rule has its present shape, or what other files were
modified together with that part of the rule, or who did those
changes.  "cvs annotate" only gives you the last version, and "cvs
log" doesn't say _what_ was changed.  The only way I know of is to use
"cvs diff -rVn -rVn+1" until you have all the history figured out and
find those changes that matter.  The fact that the ChangeLog tells you
the name of the rule is of little help, because you are still facing a
lot of changes in the same rule, even if you now can skip some of the
versions.

By contrast, if the ChangeLog states what was changed in the rule, you
can find the information you want or at least dramatically narrow the
number of version diffs you need to review just by looking up the
target's name in the log file, and then reading what was modified in
the rule.

I've been there quite a few times, and I came to appreciate a few
details in the log entry.