On 12 Jan 2021 18:14, Joseph Myers wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Jan 2021, Andrew Burgess wrote:
> > > to be clear, it isn't generating entries exactly like we write.  it's
> > > using the git commit logs with formatted dates.  so i don't think this
> > > applies exactly anymore.  so it's inline with the GNU's VCS principles:
> > > https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Change-Logs.html
> > > (and that also recommends just using gitlog-to-changelog).
> > 
> > I read this page, and especially the part that talks about using
> > gitlog-to-changelog, and I don't find their argument compelling.
> 
> What the GNU Coding Standards say about ChangeLogs isn't what would make 
> sense from a starting point of modern development practices, it's what we 
> could convince the maintainers of the GNU Coding Standards (being used to 
> ChangeLog-centric development practices) to allow.
> 
> The discussion started at 
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-standards/2017-07/msg00000.html> 
> and took a few years (a few bits were on an internal GNU Project list, but 
> most was on bug-standards).  In particular, the maintainers of the GNU 
> Coding Standards fixated on a point that they were used to using the lists 
> of changes to named entities (functions etc.) in ChangeLogs as part of the 
> debugging process, while my position is that the typical problem for which 
> such lists are used is not "map a commit to the named entities modified in 
> that change" but the inverse problem "map a named entity to the commits 
> changing it", which version control tools handle well without needing to 
> go via the ChangeLog-format lists at all.

thanks for the background info.  tbh, i'm just trying to find any authority
that i can appeal to to help convince people to autogenerate things and not
require manual creation :).
-mike