Re: [O] [patch] Don't output preamble DIV if its contents is empty

[Bastien]

Hi Sébastien,

"Sebastien Vauban" <address@hidden> writes:

> Question: why do we do like that (inserting the ChangeLog contents after the
> first line of the commit log)?  Is it automatically used somewhere to generate
> a proper ChangeLog file?

Yes -- see UTILITIES/make_emacs_changelog which collects logs from 
git commits and format them into proper Emacs ChangeLog.

> Why isn't there a real shared ChangeLog file in the repository?

There are already two "ChangeLogs", the one that you get from a
simple "git log" in Org's repo, and the ChangeLog in Emacs.

It's nice to have both: grep'ing through git logs is quick and
useful, you get a lot of detailed information here; on the other 
hand, looking for a function/variable's name in Emacs ChangeLog 
(or calling M-x occur RET in this ChangeLog buffer) is also a
nice way to get information wrt a particular function/variable.

I'm fine with a semi-auto-generated ChangeLog that I review 
and manually fix before merging new releases of Org into Emacs.

But I would not be able to maintain a separate ChangeLog for
Org only.  Of course, this is a matter of personal preference
and laziness and future maintainers might want to have an Org
ChangeLog between the git log and the Emacs Org ChangeLog.

> I want to know, because I want to learn more about all the aspects of this
> project in particular, but as well collaborative work in general...

Not sure this can be generalized as I'm not familiar enough
with other projects.

While seeking information about this issue, I stumbled upon
this fresh and not-so-unrelated post by ESR¹ and discover this
tool: reposurgeon.

¹ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3859
² http://catb.org/~esr/reposurgeon/

I promise I won't use it but I was curious if anyone tested
it on this list :)

-- 
 Bastien