GNU ChangeLogs, was Re: [PATCH] show_date(): rename the "relative" parameter to "mode"

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Feb 27, 2007, 23:18 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0702280013130.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702271453030.12485@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Hi,

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> I don't think the GNU style ChangeLog is particularly good. In fact, I 
> think it has an unfortunate tendency (thanks to being per-file-log) to 
> encourage people to commit unrelated changes and then explain them per 
> file.

Yes, that is some bad thing.

Show 5 quoted lines

> Of course, you can't do that under git anyway, but I sure hope people 
> don't start thinking that they should explain their changes in the git 
> commit messages that way - my point being that certain log formats tend 
> to encourage certain behaviour, and the GNU log format I think tends to 
> do that exactly the wrong way around.

Well, if you have to change your committing behaviour to get sensible automatic GNU ChangeLog from history, that would be a start, wouldn't it?

> That said, listing the functions that got changed (which I don't know if 
> you did, but some GNU changelogs do) may be a nice thing.

No I did not.

It is not _that_ easy with existing interfaces. Like I illustrated in an example I sent in another reply, you miss newly introduced functions.

Besides, without my Java-methods patch I sent yesterday, our function name extraction is utterly unusable on Java projects (and C++ projects with inlined methods).

> And hey, if some project wants GNU changelogs, I'm not against them. I 
> just don't think they are in any way "superior", and the per-file 
> comments really turn me off.

I think that the standard behaviour of "git log" rocks. But it would not hurt to be able to point to "git log --pretty=gnucl", to prove that Git is the ultimate SCM.

Ciao, Dscho