Re: git history tracking across renames (and emacs support)

[Stefan Monnier]

> Perhaps it could work in emacs -Q if you make the whole feature depend
> on a variable which I can set dir-locally (presumably not in Emacs, but
> in all my other projects).

Actually, I think it can be made to work without any customization
(take the absence of a ChangeLog file as the cue).

>> And having the vc-log buffer under change-log-mode is, of course,
>> trivial, either with your customizations or by default.
> But that in turn would lose me some useful that vc-log functionality.
> AFAIU the two modes should be merged, maybe one deriving from the other.

They're different:
- change-log-mode handles a sequence of commit messages
- it includes dates
- it uses a different syntax for authorship
- its entries are indented with a TAB
- it doesn't know about the special first line "Subject: ".

So, while I do think that some of change-log-mode's features should be
made available in *vc-log* buffers, it's not just a "merge".

> I think the changes envisioned above (particularly the fileless
> ChangeLog buffer) only justify working on them if noone else is working
> on the better alternative, which is IMO to automatically generate the "*
> file.ext (changed entity)" list from the diff at commit-preparation
> time, as I think someone suggested already.

AFAIK the two issues are orthogonal/complementary: ChangeLog files are
being phased out pretty much everywhere, AFAIK, so while we'll probably
want change-log-mode to keep supporting them for the foreseeable future,
we do want to adapt it to the newer use case where similar entries are
recorded in the commit log rather than in a file.

BTW, there's diff-add-change-log-entries-other-window (bound to `C-x
4 A` in diff-mode) which already tries to create the list of entries
from the diff.
[ It turns out it's not as easy as it seems to make it work well :-(  ]


        Stefan