[ft-devel] Re: Git and ChangeLogs

[David Turner]

I think this is what we want. Updating ChangeLog is already quite time consuming and I already experienced
a few frustrating merge conflict with it when pulling upstream into my own branches (these happen very easily
when you updated a file that has been modified in the pulled upstream).

On the other hand, our ChangeLog is generally more verbose and useful than the commit messages themselves,
and often is corrected to better reflect the changes, why they were made, etc..

With git this is simply not possible to update the log like this unless you want to change the upstream tree in
ways that break remote branches nastily.

So I guess we probably need to find a middle ground, i.e. generate an automatic ChangeLog from "git log" and
use a different file to document the changes (one that would not necessarily need the list of all files modified,
etc..). We already have docs/CHANGES.TXT, but this is only used to document high-level changes that affect
client developers.

Maybe we need another file like docs/INTERNAL-CHANGES.TXT ?

2009/3/25 Huw Davies <address@hidden>

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 03:37:13PM +0100, David Turner wrote:
> I also tried to apply your previous set of patches to the git repository,
> and it failed due to inconsistencies with the ChangeLog file. Can I ask you
> to provide a second set of patches from a more recent commit ?

For what it's worth, in Wine we don't submit patches that include a
ChangeLog diff.  The ChangeLog is updated automatically (from git log)
every time the maintainer makes a release.  This way we avoid
conflicts like the above.

Huw.