moving away from changelog.dd?

[Leandro Lucarella]

On Tuesday, 25 December 2012 at 18:03:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/25/2012 7:39 AM, Leandro Lucarella wrote:
>> Lots of projects take the changelog from the SCM log instead, 
>> which is the REAL
>> changelog. Of course to do that you have to write good commit 
>> messages...
>
> There's an awful lot of irrelevant detail in that log. One bug 
> fix, for example, may consist of numerous "changes" like 
> spelling corrections, incremental progress, etc.

This is only because commits are not done as they should. With 
git there is no need to do "fix previous commit" because you have 
rebase -i/amend.

Anyway, is true that even then, there are changes (like 
refactoring) that's completely irrelevant to users, so you still 
need to do some filtering to have something useful for the user 
(not impossible though).

And I want to clarify that I know is not realistic to use the git 
log now as a changelog, I'm just saying it might be worthwhile to 
pay some attention on improving the commits to move in that 
direction, so doing that becomes an option in a distant future.

> Far better to have a bugzilla list, with clickable links on 
> them to the relevant bugzilla discussion.

This is the same if you put a proper comment (fix #N) in the 
commit message, you get the automatic linking anyway.

Finally, I would love to see improved release notes in DMD, a 
higher level description of the major changes without having to 
go through the large (and growing fortunately!) list of bugfixes 
in each release. I find current changelog to be too verbose about 
"bugfixes" (bugzilla entries) and too succint about new features 
(at least including one example would make a big difference).