[phobos] Changelogs

[spir]

On 03/07/2011 10:13 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> 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?

In general: Seems to make sense. If commit logs become final change logs, then 
people would have to write meaningful commit logs (which in general is far to 
be a given ;-).
Also, user change logs often hardly can be devlopper change logs, as you say. 
(Think at yourself reading change logs of an app you are a /user/ of, even 
being a programmer... usually uncomprehensible.)

Denis
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