Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Paul Eggert]

Richard Stallman wrote:

> there are git commands for asking which functions were
> affected by a certain commit, and finding commits that affect a
> certain function....  Are
> there unusual cases they don't handle right?  For instance, do they
> work for macro definitions in C?

'git blame' and 'git diff' are line-oriented, and work equally well for macros 
vs functions vs other kinds of definitions. They're the commands I normally use 
(perhaps via front ends). I'm not sure which git commands you're referring to as 
being function-oriented.
> Perhaps we should ask all GNU developers to try out how effective the
> VC facilities are.  This means that for a certain period of time,
> everyone should continue maintaining change logs, but try to avoid
> referring to them.

Many GNU developers have already been doing that for years. For example, when 
developing I do not look at ChangeLog files in the GNU projects I help maintain, 
except for ancient history that predates use of Git or Bzr or CVS. So this 
experiment has already been done.

I can report that there is little loss in omitting ChangeLog files. And it's not 
just my personal experience. For many years GNU projects like Coreutils have 
stopped maintaining ChangeLog files by hand: the files are still placed into 
distribution tarballs to satisfy the GNU coding standards, but are autogenerated 
from Git commit messages, and developers don't read them. This has worked well.

Of course, git commit messages can be done poorly, just as ChangeLog files can 
be done poorly. Developers should use good practice in writing commit messages. 
Although a common approach is to use ChangeLog-style format in commit messages, 
they need less detail than traditional ChangeLog files since the version control 
system lets you easily go to the diff corresponding to the commit.