ChangeLog policy needed (was: Release problems)

[Christian Stimming]

Am Sonntag, 15. April 2007 05:06 schrieb Chris Lyttle:
> I had a little difficulty with the release. I found that the changelog
> had no entries, read in the mailing list that a script was supposed to
> pull in the logs during make so went ahead and released. It didnt seem
> to work tho, was there something else I needed to do?

Sorry for this. The problem you've encountered is that we abandoned our old 
ChangeLog policy but haven't agreed on a new one that provides a ChangeLog 
for the release. That's clearly something we still need to do.

The generated ChangeLog is generated by "make ChangeLog.svn". Currently this 
isn't run automatically (by "make dist" or whatever) because, as I said, we 
haven't agreed on how to really deal with this. 

As I see it, the current devs right now agree that we do not write manual 
ChangeLog messages on trunk. All of us stopped to do this eventually in 
November 2006. On the other hand, the release tarball should contain a 
ChangeLog, and we agreed this should somehow be generated from svn log. The 
question is: when and how is this being generated?

One issue is that the current rule for "ChangeLog.svn" contains the commit 
messages of *all* branches (by the option strip-prefix "gnucash" in the 
ChangeLog.svn rule), including the branches/2.0 or branches/register-rewrite, 
all of whose changes are not at all included in the actual trunk-tarball. One 
option would be to use only the commit messages of "gnucash/trunk", but that 
again would loose the commits of those branches that *are* being merged into 
trunk. Should we add an explicit list of all branches that have been merged 
into trunk? The same question was asked before, 
http://lists.gnucash.org/logs/2007-02-01.html#T08:47:30

The file ChangeLog.2006 was generated through this rule in r15487. The 
intention was that all 2006 changes are in that file. It was proposed to 
throw away the manually-created ChangeLog that stopped in 2006 
http://lists.gnucash.org/logs/2007-02-01.html#T09:21:30 ; however, the manual 
ChangeLog contains some (very few!) texts that do not appear in the 
auto-generated one. For that reason the IRC discussion ended with no result 
and we still have both the auto-generated and the manual ChangeLog of 2006. 

I still propose to discard the 2006 manual ChangeLog completely and only keep 
the auto-generated one.

As for 2007 and the future, we need to decide:
- Which branches should be used by the ChangeLog.svn rule?
- Which filename should the auto-generated Changelog have? I propose simply 
ChangeLog.
- How should the generation be included in the release process? As a 
dependency of "make dist"? Probably not (testing etc). I propose to add this 
as an extra step for the packager, like "make generated-ChangeLog".

Comments? Proposals? Flames?

Christian