Re: sim: replacing ChangeLog files with online git logs

[Simon Marchi <simon.marchi@polymtl.ca>]

We're getting into this again, I know you've said the horse has been
beaten to death about ChangeLogs, but it keeps coming up because it's a
real daily pain for many people.

On 2021-03-17 11:40 a.m., Eli Zaretskii via Gdb wrote:
> The list of files touched by a changeset can be easily generated, but
> the functions/macros/classes not so easily, and not necessarily
> accurately enough, even if we will use the more elaborate script that
> is used by glibc.  So some information loss will be present.
> 
> OTOH, the ChangeLog-format Git log messages don't require one to have
> the ChangeLog file, they just require to use the same format when
> describing the changeset.

It's not the ChangeLog file per-se that's annoying, it's writing the
entry.  It's tedious and contains mostly uninteresting information.  So
putting the ChangeLog entry in the git log instead of a file doesn't
change anything.

In the GDB project, we write what I believe are excellent git commit
messages that go in depth describing the observed problem and the
solution provided by the patch.  That provides valuable information for
anyone wanting to understand why the code is the way it is.  A list of
modified symbols doesn't help.  So I am completely fine if the "list of
modified symbols" part of the information is lost.

> If you use Emacs to make the changes
> themselves and commit the changes into Git, you just need to use the
> Emacs commands to format the Git log messages, those commands will
> produce the same information as the manual ChangeLog files
> automatically.

I don't really understand how that helps, you still have to spell out
the symbols.  But please don't assume everyone uses Emacs.  Making a
decision based on "Emacs makes it easy" and ignoring the rest of users
wouldn't be fair.

> If that is not an option that this community wants to adopt, then
> gitlog-to-changelog is probably not the adequate solution, and we
> should try using vcs-to-changelog.py (also in Gnulib).

I tried vcs-to-changelog, it gave horrible/useless results with our
codebase.  This is not an option.

Simon