Re: Circumstances in which ChangeLog format is no longer useful

[Joseph Myers]

On Sat, 29 Jul 2017, Rical Jasan wrote:

> On 07/29/2017 03:21 AM, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> > It is clearly more useful to read the following to grasp what
> > happened,
> > 
> >         * sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/powerpc/sys/ucontext.h (NFPREG)
> >         [__WORDSIZE != 32]: Rename to __NFPREG and define NFPREG to
> >         __NFPREG if [__USE_MISC].
> >         ...
> 
> $ git log --grep=NFPREG
> 
> would be what I would do and would reveal all of the following:

My proposal would mean the git logs would not include ChangeLog-format 
logs (as the problem is with needing to write in that format, for projects 
for which it is not well-suited, rather than with putting that format in 
ChangeLog files once written), and so, in this case, would not name the 
NFPREG identifier at all in the log message, only in the diff itself.  
(Of course, some logs would name the changed entities - where that's a 
relevant level for describing the change in question, which it isn't here.  
So the logs naming a function would in fact be those most likely to be 
relevant to understanding the history of that function, excluding those 
where it's incidental to a larger change.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
address@hidden