GNU bug report logs - #22506
make change-history now doesn't work at all

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Message #3 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org>
To: submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2016 14:23:09 -0500

Package: emacs
Version: 25.0.90

I don't know how y'all plan to address the issue of running make
change-history on the release branch (bug#21998), but now it doesn't
work on either emacs-25 or master. On both branches,
change-history-nocommit fails with "fatal: Invalid revision range". Eg:

  GEN      ChangeLog
fatal: Invalid revision range
3f43da09956b663d92f578e41bcacb8742bb6bba..0156b79ea8fd473c550abdb8d3e3b4eacaaab289
gitlog-to-changelog: error closing pipe from git log --log-size
'--pretty=format:%H:%ct  %an  <%ae>%n%n%B'
3f43da09956b663d92f578e41bcacb8742bb6bba..0156b79ea8fd473c550abdb8d3e3b4eacaaab289
make[1]: *** [ChangeLog] Error 128

Message #8 received at 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org>, 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Cc: Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr>
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2016 12:53:46 -0800

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Glenn Morris wrote:
> Package: emacs
> Version: 25.0.90
>
> I don't know how y'all plan to address the issue of running make
> change-history on the release branch (bug#21998), but now it doesn't
> work on either emacs-25 or master. On both branches,
> change-history-nocommit fails with "fatal: Invalid revision range".

I reproduced the problem and installed the attached patches to the emacs-25 and 
master branches to try to fix it.

In the master branch this problem was introduced by my commit 
ffbf163ab5ced1bc464a0034e6abc9a41f5e09c4 dated Sat Jan 30 14:45:53 2016 -0800. I 
did this commit by hand, not by using 'make change-history', and evidently I 
messed it up.

In the emacs-25 branch this problem was introduced by Nicolas Petton's commit 
e6b7b6d89ff9288a49099f041752908b5eb9613e dated Sat Jan 30 14:39:23 2016 +0100, 
which updated ChangeLog.2's end commit from 
8a8613bcf4227dfe46a694b761e9575bdf6ca2ce (by me dated Sat Nov 7 23:52:17 2015 
-0800) to d5195155f9a297dc45a40c9b7175715ffe4f1612 (a commit ID that does not 
exist in the Emacs repository). My guess is that Nicolas ran 'make 
change-history' on a private branch and then merged the result into emacs-25. 
This has never worked, and it's why Makefile.in tries to check for this sort of 
thing. I vaguely recall telling Nicolas to ignore the checks and do the right 
thing, but it's not at all clear what the right thing is and there should be 
little wonder that it went awry.

I guess from now on we should take those checks more seriously.

We also need to improve the procedure for keeping track of history, as the 
current procedure does not work well at all. We're better off than we were when 
ChangeLog files were maintained by hand in parallel with commit messages, but 
the by-hand maintenance of ChangeLog.2 is still too much trouble. I've proposed 
a way to improve this but to be honest I'd rather just dump the by-hand 
maintenance entirely and this has meant I'm not motivated to work on the problem.

[0001-Fix-ChangeLog.2-commit-ID.patch (text/x-diff, attachment)]

[0001-Fix-ChangeLog.2-commit-ID.patch (text/x-diff, attachment)]

Message #11 received at 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>, Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org>,
 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2016 22:47:53 +0100

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu> writes:
> My guess is that Nicolas ran 'make change-history' on a private branch
> and then merged the result into emacs-25.  This has never worked, and
> it's why Makefile.in tries to check for this sort of thing.

No, I changed the branch check on emacs-25 to check for emacs-25 instead
of master, and then ran make change-history-nocommit.

This worked without any problem.

Nico

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Message #14 received at 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr>, Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org>,
 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2016 13:50:20 -0800

Nicolas Petton wrote:
> This worked without any problem.

It worked for you, and it probably would have worked again for you in your 
environment. But it didn't work for the rest of us because we're using the 
public Emacs repository and its commit IDs are different from those in your 
repository. (Welcome to the wonderful world of distributed Git development....)

Message #17 received at 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, rgm <at> gnu.org, nicolas <at> petton.fr
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2016 05:34:18 +0200

> From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2016 13:50:20 -0800
> 
> Nicolas Petton wrote:
> > This worked without any problem.
> 
> It worked for you, and it probably would have worked again for you in your 
> environment. But it didn't work for the rest of us because we're using the 
> public Emacs repository and its commit IDs are different from those in your 
> repository.

??? How can the commits differ, assuming Nicolas pushed his to
upstream?

Message #20 received at 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, rgm <at> gnu.org, nicolas <at> petton.fr
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2016 22:44:01 -0800

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> ??? How can the commits differ, assuming Nicolas pushed his to
> upstream?

I don't know. Maybe he rebased his changes before pushing. Or maybe he did a 
merge before pushing. I suppose it could be other things.

Message #25 received at 22506-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 22506-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org, rgm <at> gnu.org, nicolas <at> petton.fr
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2016 23:41:42 -0800

I assume this particular bug (the one that blocks a release) has been fixed, so 
I'll close the bug report. If I haven't actually fixed it please feel free to 
reopen it. We do have the more-general problem that ChangeLog maintenance is a 
pain, but that should be a different bug as it does not block a release.

Message #28 received at 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>, Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, rgm <at> gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2016 09:40:54 +0100

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> writes:

>> It worked for you, and it probably would have worked again for you in your 
>> environment. But it didn't work for the rest of us because we're using the 
>> public Emacs repository and its commit IDs are different from those in your 
>> repository.
>
> ??? How can the commits differ, assuming Nicolas pushed his to
> upstream?

Indeed, I'm really confused, I pushed my commits to emacs-25 after
that...

Nico

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Message #31 received at 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, rgm <at> gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2016 09:41:48 +0100

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> ??? How can the commits differ, assuming Nicolas pushed his to
>> upstream?
>
> I don't know. Maybe he rebased his changes before pushing. Or maybe he did a 
> merge before pushing. I suppose it could be other things.

You are right, I did rebase one commit that happened in between in
emacs-25. That's most probably the reason!

Nico

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Message #34 received at 22506-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 22506-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org, rgm <at> gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2016 09:43:10 +0100

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> I assume this particular bug (the one that blocks a release) has been fixed, so 
> I'll close the bug report. If I haven't actually fixed it please feel free to 
> reopen it. We do have the more-general problem that ChangeLog maintenance is a 
> pain, but that should be a different bug as it does not block a
> release.

How should I generate the changelog files next time?  IIUC I need to
make sure no commit happens while doing so, so I won't have to rebase.

Nico

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Message #37 received at 22506-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 22506-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org, rgm <at> gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2016 08:05:32 -0800

On 02/01/2016 12:43 AM, Nicolas Petton wrote:
> How should I generate the changelog files next time?  IIUC I need to
> make sure no commit happens while doing so, so I won't have to rebase.
>

You might try something like this:

git checkout emacs-25
git pull
git diff # This should output nothing.
make change-history
git diff HEAD^ # This should output what you want.
git push

Message #40 received at 22506-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 22506-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org, rgm <at> gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2016 18:44:04 +0100

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> On 02/01/2016 12:43 AM, Nicolas Petton wrote:
>> How should I generate the changelog files next time?  IIUC I need to
>> make sure no commit happens while doing so, so I won't have to rebase.
>>
>
> You might try something like this:
>
> git checkout emacs-25
> git pull
> git diff # This should output nothing.
> make change-history
> git diff HEAD^ # This should output what you want.
> git push

I'll do that, and make sure I don't rebase.

Nico

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Message #43 received at 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: 22506 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr>
Subject: Re: bug#22506: make change-history now doesn't work at all
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2016 12:56:11 -0500

Paul Eggert wrote:

> We also need to improve the procedure for keeping track of history, as
> the current procedure does not work well at all. We're better off than
> we were when ChangeLog files were maintained by hand in parallel with
> commit messages

It's going pretty much as I expected. The overall quality of logs has
gone down, and correcting them has largely been lumped on the plate of
the person making the release. The fact that merging ChangeLog from
release branch to master has actually become harder than it was before
is an unexpected bonus though. ;)

> I've proposed a way to improve this but to be honest I'd rather just
> dump the by-hand maintenance entirely

I've also felt like suggesting dropping the ChangeLog completely,
because the project as a whole doesn't seem interested in such things.
But at a minimum, there needs to be a way to correct legally relevant
information: wrong author, missing tiny change.

I would once again suggest git notes (need to correct a commit log? add
a note with the fixed version) rather than keeping a generated file in
the repo, but I'm also unmotivated to work on it, so it's just hot air.

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