ChangeLog love

[Mike Alexander]

--On May 16, 2013 11:42:39 AM -0700 John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> 
wrote:

>> These questions are not criticisms, but really intended to stimulate
>> us to review or current  ChangeLog process. Is it still ok or time
>> to improve ?
>
> I'll go further: It makes far more sense for release tarballs to just
> have a digest of important changes in NEWS. We might have to fiddle
> autogen.sh to not whine about ChangeLog if we delete it, but let's do
> it. The whole ChangeLog thing comes from a time long ago when version
> control systems didn't have good logging. ChangeLog was where commit
> messages went. It's totally redundant nowadays.

I like something between these two extremes.  My personal model for the 
best way to handle changelogs is BBEdit [1] from Barebones, although 
doing it the way they do will take someone some time.  They manually 
list all significant changes in a release with a very short summary 
(sometimes humorous) of each change.  I don't know, but I suspect that 
these are entered when someone checks in a change or closes a bug 
report rather than all at once at release time.  I like this because it 
quickly tells me what's new and whether the bug that has been annoying 
me is fixed.

         Mike

[1] <http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/arch_bbedit1053.html>