Re: ChangeLog entries and hg

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Apr-2011, Rik wrote:

| For confirmation, is this about right?
| 
| changeset:   12596:5161d02c96b7
| branch:      stable
| tag:         tip
| user:        Rik <address@hidden>
| date:        Tue Apr 12 13:48:07 2011 -0700
| files:       doc/interpreter/container.txi doc/interpreter/octave.texi
| description:
| doc: Add help text for dynamic naming "(var)" of structure fields.
| * container.txi: Add help text.  Rename "Data Structures" to just "Structures"
| * octave.texi: Rename "Data Structures" to just "Structures"

Yes, that seems fine to me.

| Or do you want the full directory path for the file, e.g.,
| "doc/interpreter/container.txi" in the verbose comment?  Now that I write
| this, I think the shortened form is fine because the full directory path is
| available in the "files:" section from Mercurial and could always be
| automagically copied down by a script of some sort.

Yes, we could modify the template to be something like

  header = '{date|shortdate}  {author|person}  <{author|email}>\n\n'
  changeset = '\t{desc|tabindent|strip}\n\n\tFiles: 
{files|stringify|fill68|tabindent|strip}\n\n'

so that the list of all files touched by the changeset appears
explicitly.

The nice thing about the old way of using multiple ChangeLog files was
that you could just write (Array.h) or (plot/plot.m) and not have to
prefix every file name with liboctave/ or scripts/, but I don't think
there will be a lot of confusion if we don't add those prefixes now,
even though there will just be a top-level ChangeLog file.  I don't
think there are too many duplicate file names.  Where it matters (if
there are multiple module.mk files, for example, it would make sense
to add a prefix, but even then, saying plot/module.mk instead of
scripts/plot/module.mk would be enough to identify the exact file,
especially if we decide to include the full list of files
automatically in the generated ChangeLog.

jwe