Re: sim: replacing ChangeLog files with online git logs

Luis Machado via Gdb
2021-03-17T15:22:55Z

On 3/17/21 12:09 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Cc: vapier@gentoo.org, gdb@sourceware.org
>> From: Luis Machado <luis.machado@linaro.org>
>> Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2021 11:52:03 -0300
>>
>>> That's the idea, yes. Of course, for such a generated ChangeLog to be
>>> useful, the Git commit log messages should be informative enough.
>>
>> I see. Given the ChangeLog will list all the files that were changed, I
>> suppose the commit messages would only need to describe what the changes
>> are about. But the description may not list function names, files, new
>> data structures etc. Would that work?
>>
>> Or did you have something more specific in mind?
>
> Ideally, the commit log messages should provide the same information
> as the manually managed ChangeLog files, in which case generating the
> files from Git log at release time doesn't lose any information. If
> some of that information is missing from the Git logs, then the
> generated ChangeLog files will be somewhat less useful. But if the
> project doesn't require to record more than that in Git log messages,
> then it's the problem with the Git logs, not with ChangeLogs.

The commit message, at least for the GDB project, includes a subject
line, the description of the changes and an embedded ChangeLog entry. So
there are 3 sections. sim/ seems to follow the same strategy.

Given the idea is to drop ChangeLog files for sim/ (for reasons Mike has
exposed), it would make no sense to keep embedding a manually-written
ChangeLog entry in the git commit message. So the only two sections left
in the commit message would be the subject line and the description.

The list of changes would be auto-generated by a script, but it will
certainly be less descriptive than a manually-written ChangeLog entry.
It will only list things like "modified" or "new file".

>
> For example, in Emacs we ask contributors to format the Git log
> messages according to ChangeLog format, and then the generated
> ChangeLog file looks exactly like the manual one would.
>

I may be mistaken, but I think the idea is to drop ChangeLog
dependencies even from commit messages. That will simplify the
contribution process given ChangeLog files/entries will be
auto-generated by the mentioned script.