GNU bug report logs - #21998
Run 'make change-history' on release branch

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From: Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org>
To: 21998 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#21998: Run 'make change-history' on release branch
Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2016 11:46:49 -0500

Glenn Morris wrote:

> The point of this report was that merging between branches will create a
> complete mess.

I hope people appreciate this point.

For example, the Feb 15th merge skipped the "Auto-commit of ChangeLog" 
cc6d906  but did not skip "make change-history-commit" 2b7d006.
Obviously this makes no sense and means the master ChangeLog is in some
weird messed-up state. But even without this specific problem, it still
would be, since, as I said a long time ago, AFAICS there's no sensible
way to merge this stuff between branches, which is why it was disabled
on non-master branches to start with.

At this point, I give up, since it seems fairly clear that maintaining
an accurate ChangeLog just isn't of interest. Even the bare minimum
legally relevant mistakes (missing "tiny change") don't seem to be being
corrected. Probably just deleting it from the repo would be more honest.
This will simplify things, eg the "correct log entries" step for making
a release can be dropped, and the AUTHORS file can become less accurate.
A rough non-versioned ChangeLog can still be generated for tarballs, if
anyone cares. Or, a version of the above, stop keeping a versioned copy
on any branch but master.

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