Delete ChangeLog files Was :Re: ChangeLog change to .ChangeLog

[Gedare Bloom]

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 3:47 PM, Joel Sherrill <joel.sherrill at oarcorp.com> wrote:
> On 3/5/2013 2:41 PM, Chris Johns wrote:
>>
>> Sebastian Huber wrote:
>>>
>>> On 02/28/2013 01:30 AM, Gedare Bloom wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I think the git log is superior to manual ChangeLog entries, and we
>>>> can produce
>>>> higher level changes/news reports separately. Probably there is some
>>>> way to
>>>> either dump the log or selected entries when making a tar or offline
>>>> distribution. This is something we can consider.
>>>>
>>> Yes, the ChangeLog files are an anachronism.
>>>
>> I suggest we remove them. Git's log command with '--grep' provides the
>> same thing as 'grep * ChangeLog'.
>>
>> If you take a look at ...
>>
>>    http://www.rtems.org/ftp/pub/people/chrisj/rm-changelogs/
>>
>> This directory has a text file which is the output of the script and the
>> script. The left column of the text file is the line number in the
>> ChangeLog so you can check the entry against git manually. The script
>> checks each entry in all ChangeLog files against git's log command with
>> grep and 2063 entries out of 14707 did not match. I manually checked a
>> few entries and it seems a range of reasons exist for the differences.
>> For example a single ChangeLog entry is 2 commits, or take this one ...
>>
>> 5045: 2010-04-29 Sebastian Huber <sebastian.huber at embedded-brains.de>
>>
>> The ChangeLog has "PR 1507" and the commit has "PR1507". I suspect most
>> of the failed matches will be due to these types of reasons.
>
> I am perfectly fine with removing them all.
>
> They represent duplicate information and provide no value. In fact, at this
> point,
> they are dangerously out of date. That is deceptive.
+1

If the ChangeLog entry text is by and large replicated already in the
git log, then I see no reason to keep the files hanging around
bit-rotting.

IMO the commit history of the project is more important for
establishing RTEMS timeline than the changelogs. If anyone needs to
recreate this data they can dump the git log and make some format they
prefer.

We do need to provide useful notes about big changes within the core,
and about all user-visible changes. These should be tracked in release
notes, which currently I think are consolidated on a wiki page.

-Gedare