Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Richard Stallman]

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  >   The ability of everyone to 
  > get a full copy of the development history and work locally with that 
  > gives much more power in development than having the current source code 
  > and a ChangeLog summary of the history, just as having the source code 
  > gives much more power than trying to fix a problem given only the binary.

Overall, that is true.  That's why we use repositories.  But comparing
repositories with change logs would only be pertinent if we were
deciding whether to have only a repository or only a change log.

The choice is whether to maintain a change log.  What's pertinent is
that there are certain kinds of questions that are easier to answer
with a change log.

  > The good substitute is to use appropriate git workflows for the problem at 
  > hand.  For example, rather than mapping from commits to lists of changed 
  > functions, looking at the changes in the function of interest (git log 
  > -L),

We had a detailed discussion of this, and the result was that -L is
mistaken about the changed entity's name in some cases.  As a
substitute for entity names in the change log file, it is shoddy
and unreliable.

Therefore I ask people to implement a corrected sort of -L that gives
the right answers, reliably, except with very weird code.  That will
truly substitute for putting the entity names in the change log file.

  > As Paul said in 
  > <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-standards/2018-01/msg00079.html>, 
  > tools such as "git blame" are much more useful than the entity lists in 
  > practice once you're used to using them.

'git blame' shows which revisions changed certain lines.  I can see
how that is useful, but that isn't the same job as searching for a
name in ChangeLog.

Instead of arguing that we won't miss this capability because git is
so powerful, please make git provide this capability too.
Then we can stop maintaining change logs and certainly not miss
this capability, since we will still have it.

With a moderate amount of work, we can have the best of both worlds.

Perhaps the new feature can be integrated into GNU diff.





-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
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