Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > 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.

Would you please show me what those automatically generated change log
files for Coreutils look like for the past 3 years?

Then I could check directly what information they contain, and whether
anything I consider important has been left out.

  > Of course, git commit messages can be done poorly, just as ChangeLog files 
can 
  > be done poorly.

Quality of writing of the log messages is important, but that's not
the issue this discussion is about.

The issue what information they contain.

How the information is expressed, and where it is stored, are not crucial
issues.  I'm not wedded to the current format, or having this all in
a file called ChangeLog.

I am concerned about making sure that future developers can get at all
the information that properly written ChangeLog files have made
available thus far.

Many people seem very eager to get rid of ChangeLog files.
This eagerness leads me to be concerned that they are too quick
to conclude that nothing important would be lost.  Perhaps
that is true, but I want to make sure of this.

I am not looking for an excuse to say no.  I would be glad if we solve
these problems and then drop hand-written ChangeLog files.  But
pressure and repetition won't convince me.  What will convince me is a
demonstration.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See https://stallman.org/skype.html.