Re: Writing ChangeLog-style commit messages with Magit

[dick . r . chiang]

I separately inquired of OP (Mr. Tedin) why he sought this ChangeLog
automation, and he expectedly replied that CONTRIBUTE requires it.  I would
have been surprised if he said some other project imposed this antiquated
practice.

I have just now read some of the interminable discussion from July 2018
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-07/msg00364.html.
To sum up, liberals ask "Why are we imposing this chore
of questionable utility?" and conservatives reply "It's not
that much work, and utility notwithstanding, continuity is paramount."

I'm not going to re-prosecute this as Mr. Zaretskii has proclaimed "that ship
has sailed ... and I don't think it's coming back."

So I wrote github.com/dickmao/magit-patch-changelog as an "end run" to
accommodate the workflow Mr. Zaretskii prescribes:

"I generally write the GNU-style ChangeLog entries only when I land a feature
on the development branch, I don't write them while working on a feature
branch."

With magit-patch-changelog, one need merely type a few keystrokes to squash
changes in said feature branch and auto-generate the "paperwork" for
submission to address@hidden.

Mr. Postavsky's forthcoming tooling appears to auto-generate ChangeLog entries
"as you go."  This convenience appears much in demand, but not how I,
or Mr. Zaretskii apparently, prefer to work on emacs.  As quoted above, we
prefer committing freely and only complying with CONTRIBUTE when we're ready to submit.