[Gnu-arch-users] Re: taglines vs explicit

[Miles Bader]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:
> Miles> Embedded changelongs are evil because they're usually _really
> Miles> long_, and so do significantly interfere with normal usage of
> Miles> the file (and for some reason people often put them at the
> Miles> _front_ of the file...).
> 
> They put them at the front because they want them read; they give the
> recent bugfixes and feature additions.

Ha, ha, ha!  So _that's_ the theory, huh?

Of course in _this universe_ the dominant factor is the sheer enormity
of annoyance caused by having such an absurdly huge chunk of text before
the actual contents of the file (even that handy tool for intra-file
navigation, searching, often proves frustrating with embedded logs
because of all the false hits caused by the log itself).

Luckily other logging mechanisms seem to have won out; it's been a while
since I've seen an embedded log.

> Amalgamated separate ChangeLogs (as used by Emacs, for example) make
> it hard to figure out the recent history of any given file, especially
> if its not so recent.

Well, search works pretty well at least in Emacs' case.  In general, you
really want both, or some mechanism for generating one from the other
(usually I use CVS logs for per-file info; with arch I use a script --
arch is nice for that because of the large amount of useful information
log files contain).

-Miles
-- 
"Most attacks seem to take place at night, during a rainstorm, uphill,
 where four map sheets join."   -- Anon. British Officer in WW I