[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] ChangeLog usage ..

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 07:44:31PM +0100, Seblu wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 4:02 PM, Lukas Fleischer
> <archlinux at cryptocrack.de> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 11:49:39AM -0300, Angel Velásquez wrote:
> > I'm all for writing useful (and detailed, if necessary) commit messages
> > instead of writing ChangeLog entries. We use a VCS for some reason.
> > Using proper commit messages makes changes damn easy to follow without
> > having to maintain these inconvenient ChangeLog files.
> It's more easy to read a human changelog, (shipped with packages which
> don't needs to connect to archlinux.org), than developer oriented
> commits.

I don't really see any big difference here. Commit messages should be
detailed and comprehensible as well. I'm not sure what you mean by
"developer oriented" but if your commit messages cannot be understood by
any user, you're probably doing something wrong :)

Check [1] for an example of how a commit message should look like.

> We can make the synthesis of several commit in the changelog to make
> it more understandable. And still try to make atomic commits.

Yes, separate changelogs make sense if we do summarize changes that are
spread over a lot of commits (like the "NEWS" file in pacman). We
usually don't have such changes to our packages, though (99% of changes
are made in a single commit). Please let me know if I'm wrong...

> 
> In addition separates VCS message and package history, let's it
> independant from vcs tools (svn/git/hg) we choose at a time.

Proper VCS support importing history from others (check git-svn(1) and
git-cvsimport(1) for Git). And even if it cannot not be done, we could
still convert commit history to a text file later.

> -- 
> Sébastien Luttringer
> www.seblu.net

[1] http://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/commit/?id=77c0210bce1365115811f4cbb37485dc64b7f15f