Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Joseph Myers]

On Sun, 31 Dec 2017, Richard Stallman wrote:

> The other is that this
> 
>   > Regarding the overall benefit of it, I think you miss the point that VCS
>   > history (containing the diffs) is not distributed with the tarballs.
>   > For the users the NEWS and ChangeLog files are their easiest way to
>   > understand why a function doesn't act as it previously does or a file
>   > doesn't exist anymore when testing a new release.  So IMO the benefit is
>   > for the users not the maintainers.
> 
> does not seem simple -- quite the contrary, it seems that it would
> require a fair amount of expertise in using Git.
> 
> However, if people write a set of scripts to search for all changes in 
> a particular kind fo C entity, and likewise for each other language,
> that would deal with the complexity once and for all.  That might be an
> ok solution.

It's "git log -L :<funcname>:<file>".  (If a particular project is using a 
language for which that does not work well by default, that project can 
add a .gitattributes file and provide instructions on what to add to 
.git/config in your checkout to make -L work better for that language.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
address@hidden