bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all

[Glenn Morris]

Paul Eggert wrote:

> We also need to improve the procedure for keeping track of history, as
> the current procedure does not work well at all. We're better off than
> we were when ChangeLog files were maintained by hand in parallel with
> commit messages

It's going pretty much as I expected. The overall quality of logs has
gone down, and correcting them has largely been lumped on the plate of
the person making the release. The fact that merging ChangeLog from
release branch to master has actually become harder than it was before
is an unexpected bonus though. ;)

> I've proposed a way to improve this but to be honest I'd rather just
> dump the by-hand maintenance entirely

I've also felt like suggesting dropping the ChangeLog completely,
because the project as a whole doesn't seem interested in such things.
But at a minimum, there needs to be a way to correct legally relevant
information: wrong author, missing tiny change.

I would once again suggest git notes (need to correct a commit log? add
a note with the fixed version) rather than keeping a generated file in
the repo, but I'm also unmotivated to work on it, so it's just hot air.