Re: Git ChangeLog policy for GCC Testsuite inquiry

[Segher Boessenkool <segher@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 06:43:54PM -0700, Jeff Law wrote:
> On Wed, 2020-02-05 at 15:18 -0600, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
> > As a reviewer, the changelog is priceless still.  We shouldn't drop the
> > changelog before people write *good* commit messages (and we are still
> > quite far from that goal).
> I believe the current proposal is not to switch immediately, but to do
> so after gcc-10 is released.  Feel free to suggest improvements to
> ChangeLogs or summaries in the mean time to get folks to start
> rethinking what they write in 'em.

I think I will be quite busy until the end of stage 4 already, but sure,
of course I will not shut up.

> And FWIW, we're talking about the ChangeLog *file* here.

I don't think we were.  I have absolutely nothing against only putting
the changelog entries at the end of the commit message and extracting
that later, of course (although it is almost trivial to copy it to the
changelog files manually, I have the same workflow for it as when we
still committed with SVN, just "git am" instead of more clunky stuff,
I suspect it will streamline things, esp. for new people).

> If folks
> continued writing the same log messages and put them into git, I
> personally think that's sufficient to transition away from having a
> ChangeLog file in the source tree.

Sure.  Just needs a flag day, always painful, but it will help.

> I don't want to make perfect the enemy of the very very good here and
> moving away from a ChangeLog file in the source tree is, IMHO, very
> very good.

If you rebase changelog files, then yes, it's a bloody pain ;-)


Segher