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Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2021 17:09:32 +0200
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From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
To: Luis Machado <luis.machado@linaro.org>
Cc: vapier@gentoo.org, gdb@sourceware.org
In-Reply-To: <bbc6fd38-3f1d-d13a-d3ab-6bfaf8a1504b@linaro.org> (message from
 Luis Machado on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 11:52:03 -0300)
Subject: Re: sim: replacing ChangeLog files with online git logs
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> Cc: vapier@gentoo.org, gdb@sourceware.org
> From: Luis Machado <luis.machado@linaro.org>
> Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2021 11:52:03 -0300
> 
> > That's the idea, yes.  Of course, for such a generated ChangeLog to be
> > useful, the Git commit log messages should be informative enough.
> 
> I see. Given the ChangeLog will list all the files that were changed, I 
> suppose the commit messages would only need to describe what the changes 
> are about. But the description may not list function names, files, new 
> data structures etc. Would that work?
> 
> Or did you have something more specific in mind?

Ideally, the commit log messages should provide the same information
as the manually managed ChangeLog files, in which case generating the
files from Git log at release time doesn't lose any information.  If
some of that information is missing from the Git logs, then the
generated ChangeLog files will be somewhat less useful.  But if the
project doesn't require to record more than that in Git log messages,
then it's the problem with the Git logs, not with ChangeLogs.

For example, in Emacs we ask contributors to format the Git log
messages according to ChangeLog format, and then the generated
ChangeLog file looks exactly like the manual one would.