emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?


From: Andreas Röhler
Subject: Re: Is it time to drop ChangeLogs?
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 08:45:02 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Icedove/45.1.0



On 09.07.2016 18:55, Richard Stallman wrote:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

   > They use the version control system. This provides different information
   > from the changelogs, of course. Worse in some cases, but better in
   > others. A function that is renamed, for example, but stays in the same
   > place in the file is better tracked by VC than a changelog.

With all due respect, I think that is not true, not even close to
being true.  The change log is tremendously better in all cases than
any other method I've seen.  It is hard work to recover the change log
from a diff.

A diff doesn't generally show the names of the entities that it
changes.  It takes human effort have to see which entities are changed
in any given checkin; thus, it takes lots and lots of human effort to
find which checkins to the file affected any given entity.


Agree as a person who changed his opinion several times in this point:

pure diff-logs don't provide a comparable information.
Given an environment like Emacs, where communication is an important issue, a changelog seems worth its effort.



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]