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

[Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>]

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.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com