Re: [flame] NEWS file is useless

[Nicolas Roard]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 10:15 PM, Riccardo Mottola <address@hidden> wrote:
> David Chisnall wrote:
>>
>> On 25 Nov 2009, at 22:39, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
>>
>>> There are actually three levels of change information ...
>>> NEWS  ... just the headlines
>>> ReleaseNotes ... some more detail
>>> ChangeLog ... everything
>>>
>>> Maybe you are right and we shouldn't bother with NEWS?  I'd be interested
>>> to know what others think.
>>
>> I'd be in favour of ditching NEWS and ChangeLog.
>>
>> ChangeLog has less information, in a less useful format, than the svn logs
>> and is a hold-over from CVS not storing repository-wide change information
>> sensibly.  With svn log, you can get a log of change messages at any
>> granularity that you like.  If anyone actually cares about ChangeLog then
>> they can do 'svn log > ChangeLog' on their local machine.  Stuff in the svn
>> log can be processed easily, and is easier for people to check than the
>> ChangeLog, for example:
>
> Well, I disagree.
> The utility of NEWS is questionable, but ChangeLog should be preserved. Not
> only in a ChangeLog I can write more than in a commit and I can group files
> and comment on sigle pieces of them, but it is an easy file I can check.
> Also, ChangeLog gets released, so it is available in the end-suer release
> tarball.

I think we should keep the ChangeLog file, but I really don't see the
point in NOT generating it automatically. Nothing prevent you to write
more detailed commits logs, and it really feels like duplication to me
(and you can always forget to modify the ChangeLog...).

> ReleaseNotes may contain comments about incompatibilities, deprecations of
> methods, upgrade procedures...
> NEWS is perhaps more geared towards notable end-user readable things like
> new features, big fixes. It is perhaps more useful for an Application than
> the library.
>
> Riccardo
>
>
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-- 
Nicolas Roard
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