Re: Whither changelogs

[Richard Morse]

> On Oct 6, 2021, at 10:03 AM, G. Branden Robinson 
> <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> At 2021-10-05T08:56:24+0100, Keith Marshall wrote:
>> The sooner we deprecate free-standing ChangeLog files, the better,
>> IMO.
> 
> My resistance this idea lies in the fact that people err, including in
> commit messages, but commit messages are set in stone once pushed
> (because Merkle trees).  Many is the time I've gone back and fixed a
> thinko in a ChangeLog entry I wrote.
> 
> A ChangeLog is a vehicle for developer-to-developer (or
> developer-to-sophisticated-user) communications.  Like nearly any other
> document, it needs to be subject to revision for correction of errata,
> bearing in mind that its purpose is to log changes.  If you misdescribe
> the change you have made, you should be able to fix such a misstatement
> in some place less ephemeral than a mailing list or Discord channel.

I’m more a user of groff than a developer of it, so I apologize for throwing 
myself into this conversation, but I just wanted to add that, when done well, a 
manually maintained changelog file is much more useful to me, as a user, than a 
automatically generated one that consists of a list of commit messages. Not all 
changes are of the same weight or import; I find that written changelog files 
tend to spend more time on the items that are worth spending time on, and 
glossing over the things that aren’t going to affect people looking to see why 
they should upgrade.

Many thanks,
Ricky