Re: Rant about ChangeLog entries and commit messages

[Tim Josling <tejgcc@westnet.com.au>]

On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 13:58 -0500, Diego Novillo wrote:
> On 12/03/07 13:50, Richard Kenner wrote:
> >> I guess that could work, but that wouldn't give a way into the history 
> >> for the change.  Several times there is a post-mortem discussion on the 
> >> patch, leading to more patches.
> > 
> > How about both?
> 
> Sure.
> 
> 
> Diego.

Quite a few people are worried about verbose descriptions of changes
cluttering up the ChangeLog. Others (like me) would like a way easily to
find the discussions about the change, and would like a brief indication
in the ChangeLog of the context of the change. The FSF also has good
reasons for keeping solid records of who made what change.

So, how about this:

1. For a PR fix, continue to record the PR number and category.
Like this: 
      PR tree-optimization/32694

2. For all changes, a one-line record giving the context, plus the URL
of a key message in the email message trail, unless the intent is
plainly obvious such as bumping the version number.
Like this:
      Gimplification of Fortran front end. 
      http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2007-12/msg00072.html       

3. Continue to record "who made what change".
Like this: 
       * config/xtensa/xtensa.c (xtensa_expand_prologue): Put a
REG_FRAME_RELATED_EXPR note on the last insn that sets up the stack
pointer or frame pointer.

This should satisfy everyone's needs.

This would by no means be the largest divergence from the FSF standards
by the GCC project. The use of languages other than C in the Ada front
end is non-compliant by my reading. The compliance of the rest of the
code to the FSF standards is spotty at times eg the garbage collection
code.

While this is a divergence from the FSF standards, it is a positive
change and no information is being lost.

It would be interesting to ask someone who was around at the time why
the guidelines were written as they were. They rationale may no longer
be relevant.

Tim Josling