Re: [flame] NEWS file is useless

[Nicola Pero]

> I'd be in favour of ditching NEWS and ChangeLog.
>
> ChangeLog has less information, in a less useful format, than the  
> svn logs and is a hold-over from CVS not storing repository-wide  
> change information sensibly.  With svn log, you can get a log of  
> change messages at any granularity that you like.

I agree there is an overlap, but there are also some differences. ;-)

Subversion records a single log message for an entire transaction,  
which might contain changes to a number of files.
A ChangeLog entry is supposed to contain a separate log message for  
every file that was changed.

So, ChangeLogs are particularly good for software that is stable and  
where changes should be very well thought of -- forcing people
to describe each single change to each file is good to slow  
development down and get people to think more about what they are doing.

If people are submitting patches, ChangeLog entries also have the  
advantage that they can be submitted with the patch,
and they provide a more detailed description of the changes that were  
done to each file, and why.

Finally, the obvious advantage of a ChangeLog is that every source  
code distribution/tarball will include it.  Subversion logs are only
available if you use subversion.

I still see your point - particularly for new software, written from  
scratch by a single person and not yet really released, it is faster
to just code it all and write short subversion logs for each commit -  
it sounds superfluous to also write ChangeLog entries.  But
once the software is quite finished and stable, is widely used and  
released, and we're polishing it while being extremely careful
not to break things, then a more careful approach where every change  
is documented in great detail (and even redundantly) looks
good to me. ;-)

So maybe we could adopt a different approach depending on the  
project.  I certainly think ChangeLogs are very good for the core
libraries.

Thanks