Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Joseph Myers]

On Mon, 1 Jan 2018, Mike Gerwitz wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 20:59:32 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > The substantial job here is to write code that can find all the named
> > entities in the source file, and associate each entity's name with a
> > range of line numbers.  If it does this job right in all the cases
> > source files contain, it would be easy enough to determine
> > automatically the name of each entity and which ones were changed
> > in a givien commit.
> 
> Don't we also need a way to associate a description with each of those
> changes?  I don't see identifying entities as a difficult problem for
> someone who has time to do it, but it doesn't eliminate the need for
> hand-writing descriptions of the changes.

My claim is that given the diffs themselves and the logical description of 
the change at the level that is appropriate for the particular change in 
question, descriptions of the changes at the level of each named entity 
are redundant, don't provide significant extra utility and force a focus 
on a particular level of detail that is the wrong level at which to 
understand many changes.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
address@hidden