[phobos] Changelogs

[Jens Mueller]

spir wrote:
> 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.)

git-extras (https://github.com/visionmedia/git-extras) may be helpful
for changelogs. It ships with git changelog which generates a template
based on the commits since the last release and opens an editor.
I suppose you can find more tools to support such tasks.

Jens