ChangeLog love

[John Ralls]

On May 16, 2013, at 12:35 PM, Mike Alexander <mta at umich.edu> wrote:

> --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>

That looks like a digest: It's missing all of the "oops" commits that show up in a raw log. I usually do something similar in NEWS when I do a release, except that I separate design changes and bug fixes into separate sections. That follows a pattern of NEWS files I found when I started doing releases last year.

Regards,
John Ralls