[RFC] Policy change for ChangeLog

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 06:37:32PM -0700, Chris Lyttle wrote:
> Um, actually even tho HEAD currently doesn't have the NEWS file from
> 1.8.x it is there and NEWS has been updated for every release so far. I
> know, I do those updates 'manually' from looking at the log messages in
> the Changelog and watering it down for public consumption. The 1.8.x
> NEWS file should probably be merged back over to HEAD.

Strange.  It's on the 1.8 branch.  I wonder how much other stuff is
sitting in 1.8 that should be in HEAD...

> I agree with the idea of only doing a ChangeLog for each major release.
> It is necessary to be able to look back over how the current release is
> developed IMHO. I really would not like to see a ChangeLog file
> auto-generated from commit messages. I've seen far to many of those go
> by with 'updated blah for foobar' which really doesn't give me enough to
> write the NEWS file with. The ChangeLog nearly always has that sort of
> info. 

I also noticed that sometimes the commit messages aren't as helpful as
the ChangeLog entries.  But, I'm not suggesting we should stop writing
good commit descriptions, just that we should only manually put good
commit descriptions into just one place.  So, a ChangeLog exported
from svn should be just as informative (if not more) for harvesting
NEWS entries.

-chris