Re: Using the vcs_to_changelog.py script

[Simon Marchi <simon.marchi@polymtl.ca>]

On 2020-02-13 1:58 p.m., Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>   2) we need some guidelines for "good commit messages", otherwise
>      patch review will need to pay a lot of attention to discussing
>      that and making sure the log messages are fine

We can write some guidelines for sure, it wouldn't hurt.  But I think that as a
project, we have already some quite good standards in terms of commit messages.
These discussions already happen during reviews.  And even with those guidelines
written, we'll still need to pay attention to it, because I can assure you that
we will still receive patches with bad or non-existent commit messages.

>> However, for the benefit of people just using
>> tarballs, and not the VCS, we generate a ChangeLog file from the diff.
>> Naturally, the generated ChangeLog will be less informative than one written
>> by humans (it won't say what changed in a function, it will just say that
>> the function has been modified), but since that procedure was adopted by glibc,
>> and is mentioned in the proposed standards.texi change, then it must have been
>> considered an acceptable compromise.
> 
> I have yet to see this accepted as GNU policy.

Sure, we can wait for this to become official.

>
And at least
> personally, having a ChangeLog in a tarball that just says which
> function was changed on what date is almost useless to me (and I do
> sometimes need to work without access to the VCS repositories).

Indeed.

Simon