Re: [PATCH] sim: switch to autogenerated ChangeLog files

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2021 18:14:22 +0000
> From: Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>
> Cc: gdb-patches@sourceware.org
> 
> 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.

When did you last read the current text of GSoC, specifically the part
related to change logs?

The fact is that you did convince, and the text was modified to allow
the MO which you argued for, as one possible alternative.

> 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.

Having the list of changed entities in the logs is now a just a
recommendation; the text describes the advantages of having that, but
it doesn't insist.  Please check out the latest text (maybe it is
still only in CVS, not on prep, I don't keep track of that).