Re: Rant about ChangeLog entries and commit messages

[kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner)]

> > I'd go even further, and say if the GNU coding standards say we
> > shouldn't be putting descriptions of why we are changing things in the
> > ChangeLog, than they should be changed and should be ignored on this
> > point until they do.  Pointing to them as the if they are The One True
> > Way seems very suspect to me.  After all, how else would they ever
> > improve if nobody tries anything different?
> 
> The people who wrote them presumably thought about these issues, too.

My understanding is that the concern in going the other way was in
having a ChangeLog that was too long to easy scan.  Now yes, it's true
that the concept of scanning a ChangeLog rather than a CM log quite
dated at this point, but that's GNU coding standards issue, not a GCC
issue and I don't think that trying to change that will produce much more
than heat.  I do, however, think that we have significant flexibility
in content of the svn commit message and could well decide that it's
useful to do more than echo the ChangeLog entry, but instead could include
most of the text of the patch submission message.