[phobos] Changelogs

[Russel Winder]

On Sun, 2011-03-06 at 19:36 -0800, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
[ . . . ]
> 2. As it stands, we have one changelog file, and it's in the d-programming-
[ . . . ]

A quick challenge to orthodoxy . . . 

Why maintain a changelog at all?  The whole changelog workflow was
introduced because version control systems were not good enough.  Now
that Git is being used release notes can be constructed from the commit
logs as part of the release process.

On Sun, 2011-03-06 at 21:56 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
Some good points.
> 
> 1. For the *user* of D, rather than the developer of D, I think he'd 
> want to see the changelog in one place rather than clicking around to 
> look at various changelogs.

Certainly there needs to be a summary of the changes for each release
for users to tell them what is going to break, or better what cruft can
be removed in favour of good stuff.  However why write a changelog and a
commit message?  This seems to be redundancy; definitely not DRY.

Also what use is a changelog? It's a log not a summary, and what users
want is a retrospective summary, they don't want a log -- and the log is
the commit messages, which can be got by issuing a git command.

> 2. I understand that a single changelog can be problematic for the 
> developer of D. So it is possibly a reasonable solution to create a 
> changelog per phobos, druntime, and dmd, and then merge them for the 
> releases.

If you have to have a changelog and there are three distinct projects
then have a new project which is just the changelog for all three?

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
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