Re: [flame] NEWS file is useless

[Fred Kiefer]

I know that I am rather late to jump into this discussion, but I was
away for a few weeks and only read through it now.

I strongly agree with Nicola's points here. I don't just write but also
read the ChangeLog a lot. Before every substantial change I try to find
the ChangeLog entry for the original code to understand why the code is
the way it is now. This often helps to improve my own change. With the
svn log I could find out about the comment for the specific file, but
not what was going on around it. This is valuable information and we
need to preserve it. And the next time we change our version control
system we surely will be glad to have the old ChangeLog files to look up
older comments.

Nicola Pero schrieb:
>>> Also, A ChangeLog is easy to search. When something breaks I grep in
>>> the changelog. Old habits.
>>
>> Why is:
>>
>> cat ChangeLog | grep
>>
>> easier than:
>>
>> svn log | grep
> 
> Because using a ChangeLog doesn't require internet access, and it is
> *much* faster. :-)
> 
> And for people who get a source tarball, they don't even need to have
> subversion installed,
> or know where the repository is located or how to access it.
> 
> Anyway, it seems a long discussion on a minor point.
> 
> I suggest we could simply manually copy the ChangeLog entry in the svn
> commit message every time we do a commit.
> Then the ChangeLog entry would be available also via svn log for people
> who use svn logs instead of ChangeLogs
> to track development.
> 
> I guess this could be automated so a subversion hook would check that
> every commit contains a ChangeLog entry,
> and would automatically copy it into the subversion commit message.  As
> hooks would slow down an already slow repository,
> we could also simply agree to do it manually.  If someone gets it wrong
> it will be immediately obvious by looking at the
> svn logs and can be corrected.