From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Nick Burrett To: obrien@NUXI.com Cc: David Edelsohn , gcc@gcc.gnu.org Subject: Re: Conerned about lack of detail in ChangeLog/commit messges Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2000 09:13:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <200006091530.LAA28216@mal-ach.watson.ibm.com> <20000609085131.P55675@dragon.nuxi.com> X-SW-Source: 2000-06/msg00273.html "David O'Brien" writes: > On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 11:30:21AM -0400, David Edelsohn wrote: > > David> The diff from 1.25 to 1.26 is large enough to explain the change. > > David> Looking at ``cvs log gengenrtl.c'' I was unable to find any details on > > David> the "gcc2-ss-010999" branch. > > > > What you list above is the CVS entry, not the ChangeLog entry. > > The entry in ChangeLog.2 says: > > > > * Merge from gcc2 snapshot Jan 9, 1999. See FSFChangeLog for > > details. > > Sorry, I was under the impression (from what I've seen in other CVS > commit messages) that the ChangeLog text is in the commit message. IMHO > CVS logs are much easier to use to find the notes on a change than the > ChangeLog's. > > GCC ChangeLog's do not use a consistent date format, thus it is time > consuming to find the entry you are looking for as searching in your > favorite viewer isn't as good as it could be. Nor does this ChangeLog > entry contain the name of the modified file as it should. In this case, > I could not use any of the CVS message text in searching for the > ChangeLog entry except for the word "Merge". This would be easily resolvable if in future the ChangeLog date and e-mail header were included in the CVS commit messages. It would make things much easier to cross-reference since the CVS date is always going to be slightly different to the ChangeLog date. I'm not sure if CVSweb would cope very well with this though. > > > Did you check FSFChangeLog (which contains the ChangeLog entries from the > > gcc2 development > > I did not. I forgot that there was a FSFChangeLog vs. just ChangeLog. I > guess I'm just used to the other projects who's CVS repo I work with. > There is an emphasis on detail in commit messages to assist people in > finding out about changes. I'm surprised the message above didn't at > least tell people to see the FSFChangeLog (and give the applicable date > range) for details on the changes. Perhaps it would have been better to include the FSFChangeLog directly into the ChangeLog under a single entry in the same way that is done for older branches. It's a bit late in the day for that though. > > The actual various ChangeLog files are the historical repository, not > > CVS log entries. > > Yes I know. IMHO now that the world has access to the CVS logs, they > could be better used now. I think it is much easier to look at a ChangeLog than look at the CVS logs for individual files. The `cvs log' has to keep on being re-generated, the ChangeLog is there, fast to access, and provides a good overview of all files changed, rather than just a few. Nick.