From: Johannes Schindelin Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:18:18 GMT Subject: GNU ChangeLogs, was Re: [PATCH] show_date(): rename the "relative" parameter to "mode" Message-ID: In-Reply-To: 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. > 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