Re: Script to generate ChangeLogs automatically

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   People need to use a range of tools to find their way around a source tree 
   with tens of thousands of files and work out which ones are relevant to 
   edit to address their issue.  For many things in glibc, people need to be 
   familiar with many advanced GNU make features, with properties of the ELF 
   object format and symbol aliases, with issues around ABI compatibility and 
   symbol versioning, with namespace requirements of different standards, 
   with peculiarities of various CPU architectures where those influence 
   things in glibc.

I disagree on that, you don't have to have any familiarity with that
at all to make useful contributions to glibc, nor should we make it
harder by requiring a complicated, hard to understand tool like git to
just be able to poke around in history.  

People with many years of hacking behind them have a hard time
figuring out git, let alone how to do these magical incantations to
understand history.  And while git is prevailant, it should not be a
requirement that to one must be an expert in its use to be able to get
something half reasonable out of it.  I'd go as far that how to do
these queries is outside most peoples daily git usage.  And this is
ignoring non-developers ... something that has been the nicest way of
learning what is going on in a project is browsing the ChangeLog.

Personally I'd rather not spend time learning a dozen VCS and rather
spend it on doing actual work.  Most of my usage of git is via vc-mode
in Emacs, is there some way of getting this information from there in
a VCS agnostic manner?  I did not find anything like that, which is
the big benefit of ChangeLog-style files (be them autogenerated, or
manual).