GNU bug report logs -
#21998
Run 'make change-history' on release branch
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Reported by: Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org>
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2015 19:09:01 UTC
Severity: normal
Tags: notabug
Found in version 25.0.50
Done: Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org>
Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.
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> From: Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org>
> Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2016 01:51:17 -0500
> Cc: 21998 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
>
> > 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.
>
> In concrete terms, what is the problem with these mistakes?
The mistakes are not being corrected. Experience shows that
correcting them is enough of an annoyance to discourage people.
> Where is the master record of this information now?
In the Git commit messages.
> Is it being maintained correctly there?
When a mistake is made there, it cannot be corrected, because Git
commit log is immutable. Corrections must be made manually to a
ChangeLog file produced from the Git log by a script. That proved not
to work well, see above. It also proved to be a non-trivial problem
when merging changes from the release branch to master -- for this
latter issue we still don't have any idea for how to solve it reliably
and without requiring a lot of manual labor.
> Probably just deleting it from the repo would be more honest.
>
> What exactly are you proposing as the new practice
> for handling ChangeLog files?
There are 3 possibilities:
. Keep the current system, where ChangeLog is produced from Git log
and mistakes made in Git log should be corrected manually after
producing ChangeLog
. Give up on having ChangeLog files, either produced from Git log or
maintained in the repository -- meaning a tarball will not include
any ChangeLog at all
. Go back to previous practice where we maintained ChangeLog files
in the repository, and Git log messages were just copies of the
ChangeLog entries
This bug report was last modified 9 years and 108 days ago.
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