Re: gEDA-dev: Thoughts on ChangeLog vs. NEWS

[Dan McMahill <dan-at-NOSPAMmcmahill_dot_net>]

Peter TB Brett wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> Recently some discussion has taken place regarding what ChangeLog and NEWS are 
> for.  As you know, both are mandated by the GNU packaging style guidelines.
> 
> For most GNU projects, ChangeLog is generated by cvs2cl.pl (or similar for VC 
> systems other than CVS), and NEWS is a hand-maintained 'quick reference' 
> document for changes, with headings for versions.
> 
> The current gEDA ChangeLog file is trying to fulfil both roles: a detailed 
> description of changes committed to CVS as well as a good way of working out 
> what's changed in each release.
> 
> Unfortunately, it's not really succeeding at either.  Because people are 
> adding detailed commit descriptions to ChangeLog, they're often not bothering 
> to input sufficiently descriptive CVS log messages, which breaks 'cvs log' 
> and makes working out what changed when somewhat tricky, while ChangeLog is 
> more or less useless when trying to quickly check the changes that have been 
> made recently.

eek.  I personally think we should just regen ChangeLog via cvs2cl.pl 
from time to time and not worry about maintaining it as its own item. 
Certainly thats not the place to add extra info over what was in the 
commit log.

For pcb snapshots, I read over the change log and try to summarize the 
important bits into NEWS.  This, and updating ChangeLog via cvs2cl.pl, 
happens once per snapshot.

-Dan




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