Commit messages

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 01/26/2012 08:54 AM, Sebastian Huber wrote:
> On 01/24/2012 04:24 PM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> [...]
>> It's quite simple: Automated changelogs are nice in small projects (where
>> actually nobody cares about them) but do not meet many larger projects's
>> demands and are a true PITA to use.
> [...]
>
> Since the world is great, there are examples for nearly everything. The
> Linux and FreeBSD kernel uses no ChangeLog files at all.
And? FreeBSD has other bureaucracy, and Linus' VCS preferences have 
always been "special".

Other projects, e.g. Fedora, GCC, etc. are using manually written 
ChangeLogs, not because the GCS recommends doing so, but because they 
understand why automated changelogs don't fly.

> What they
> provide are release notes and these are by far more interesting for end
> users than a collection of per file changes.
Right, ChangeLogs are boring to end-users, but they are interesting to 
developers and others, e.g. to _lawyers_.

> Using ChangeLog files and Git is absurd.

I could not disagree more

Git is just a VCS amongst many, with advantages and disadvantages of its 
owns. It's just the ongoing hype which is blending the "git-kiddies" and 
lets them believe they would not need ChangeLogs.

Again, ChangeLogs are text documents, like READMEs and many other 
documents. They are much more than a simple transformation of a VCS's 
internal commit messages.

Ralf