Re: Script to generate ChangeLogs automatically

[Per Bothner]

On 11/21/18 4:10 AM, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:

> There is a general consensus among the glibc community to stop maintaining a 
> ChangeLog file and we were told that the requirement for doing that was to have 
> a script that provided a representation of the git log that looks similar to a 
> ChangeLog.
>
> ...
> the tool generates the following ChangeLog entry:
>
> 2018-08-01  H.J. Lu  <address@hidden>
>
>      COMMIT: 82c80ac2ebf9acc81ec460adfd951d4884836c7c
>      * sysdeps/x86/cpu-features.c: Modified.
>      (get_common_indeces): Removed.
>      (init_cpu_features): Modified.
>      (get_common_indices): New.

This is nice, but I think secondary.  The point is to avoid
duplicating the work of writing both commit messages and ChangeLogs.
So the main source for the ChangeLog should be the human-written
text from commit-messages.  A list of functions that were removed,
added, or modified has limited use - what does it get you that
'git diff' doesn't?  It's slightly more convenient, that's all.

One approach is a convention to write commit messages in ChangeLog style:
A one-line summary, followed by a blank line, followed by more detailed
changes.  The latter would use ChangeLog conventions/recommendations, except
without the indentation.  I.e. asterisks in column 1.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/