[RFC] Policy change for ChangeLog

[Christian Stimming]

Derek Atkins schrieb:
>> On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 16:25 -0500, Chris Shoemaker wrote:
>>
>>> Comments?
>>
>> This change is fine with me, and sounds good.
> 
> Before we go ahead with this, I'd like to hear from Chris Lyttle
> and Christian Stimming..  They're the ones who usually use the
> ChangeLog to generate the NEWS and release notes.  I'd like to
> hear if they are willing to accept the new process going forward.

I wouldn't throw away our ChangeLog convention too quickly. It used to 
be (and still is) a good compromise between readability and verbosity.

The problem is that we don't have any experience with maintaining that 
obnoxious "big picture file", which supposedly would be the NEWS file. 
So far that file has been used for the release notes until 1.7.8 but is 
unused since them. We do have experience with the Changelog file, and 
these are good experiences so far. Developer tend to copy the ChangeLog 
entry to the CVS/SVN commit log or vice versa, so this convention 
doesn't seem to put too much of an additional work on the developers.

As for compiling the release notes: Definitely the "svn log" is way too 
verbose for the normal release note compilation. Currently working 
through anything between 100 or 500 lines of ChangeLog during 1.8.x was 
doable, but thousands of lines of "svn log" really is way too much.

IMHO our ChangeLog convention or what developers did from that meant 
that all the totally-trivial things were already filtered out, and this 
would be lost if we don't use ChangeLog at all. The point is that 
ChangeLog still is the "note collection for the developers", whereas the 
NEWS is the "note collection for the public", i.e. only that stuff that 
as the time of writing is already considered fundamentally important. 
Many things that might not be considered important at the time of 
writing will not be added to the NEWS file, whereas they are added to 
the ChangeLog -- where the release note collectors will pick it up at 
the time when it's required.

> At some level it's OUR job as developers to make OTHERS lives
> easier..  While we should certainly use tools to make OUR lives
> easier, we need to think of who is using what we create and how
> they use it.  Making life easier for us at their expense is NOT
> okay.  So, I'd like to hear from wilddev and cstim first.

I prefer if there still is a place where every developer adds a note for 
the majority of the non-trivial commits. Doesn't have to be the 
ChangeLog, but IMHO that's the easiest way to do this. The NEWS file 
IMHO is "too official"/"too public" for that goal.

Christian