Re: Manual merges.

[dherring]

On Fri, 21 Oct 2011, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Oct 2011, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>>>
>>> Should I perhaps file a bug that the ChangeLog file should be
>>> generated?
>>>
>> That would be a good idea in the long(ish) term.  In fact, I pesonally
>> see
>> ChangeLogs as a relic of the pre-VCS era; they were surely VERY useful
>> to
>> track regressions and bugs and backward-incompatibilites back then, but
>> today that we have the "real" project history in the VCS repo, and lots
>> of
>> tools to view and analyze it, the ChangeLogs (as well as the GCS rules
>> to
>> write them) are becoming more and more of a nuisance.
...
> It is typical that ChangeLog messages are considerably higher grade
> and more detailed than commit messages.  However, the version control
> system also offers capabilities (e.g. change sets) that the ChangeLog
> does not offer.

Agreed.

On my own "real" projects (the ones with real users), I view the version
control logs as messages for active developers and ChangeLog as messages
for users and occasional developers.  So git sees small one-off messages
on a regular basis, and the ChangeLog is updated when big user-visible
changes are made.  Then I review the git logs before each release
candidate and edit the ChangeLog to make sure it has a good summary of all
user-visible changes.

In this model, the ChangeLog is quite important, but daily ChangeLog
updates really don't make much sense.

- Daniel