Re: ChangeLog entries and hg

[Rik]

On 04/12/2011 06:44 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 11-Apr-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> 
> | The ChangeLog are gonna be particularly problematic with the new
> | workflow,
> 
> Yes, I realized that as soon as I tried a merge with a real change to
> Octave instead of just a simple change to a source file.
> 
> | If this isn't too much rabble-rousing, I think this is a good time to
> | adopt a new policy: hg commit messages should contain the details that
> | the ChangeLogs used to have, roughly in the same format; we keep the
> | ChangeLogs around for archival purposes, and we extract information
> | from the "hg log" command in order to generate future ChangeLogs for
> | tarball releases.
> 
> If we do this, then we need to be more careful about how we write
> ChangeLog entries.  Also, we should probably only have one ChangeLog
> file rather than one for each major directory tree in the sources
> since it won't be easy to automatically split out the hg commit
> messages and put some parts in one file and some in another.
> 
> Is there a tool for generating a ChangeLog file from an hg commit
> message?  The tool could assume that the log message is formatted like
> a ChangeLog entry.

Mercurial has "styles" which are templates for how the commit log should
look.  'hg log --style changelog' produces something that is reminiscent of
what we have now.  Documentation on using styles is here:
http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/customizing-the-output-of-mercurial.html.
We could modify the changelog style or even post-process the Mercurial log
with something like Perl if we only need to do it once per release.

I'm very supportive of this change as I find a lot of my time spent coding
a patch is extraneous details like tracking down the correct ChangeLog file
to post to and then saving those comments in a buffer so that I can
re-enter them in the Mercurial commit log.

--Rik