Subject: bug#7367: 24.0.50; change logs in source code

From: Štěpán Němec <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2010 17:42:15 +0100

"Drew Adams" <[email-masked]> writes:

[...]

> Please restore the normal, helpful, user-friendly source-file change
> logs that were in the author's file.  Emacs users should be able to get
> the info they need by consulting only the source code.  They should not
> need any Internet access, in particular.
>  
> This seems like just laziness on the part of Emacs development.
> But is also an anti-user policy.

[...]

> Emacs source files contain lots of text such as `Todo list' that is less
> important than change-log history.  Users deserve better than telling
> them to go search the Internet for change history.
>
> Change logs are not just for Emacs developers' internal use.
> They are for users.

They are neither. They're completely useless.

Just to provide a different opinion: I never saw a useful `Change Log:'
section in any of (quite a lot of) Elisp libraries I've seen (Emacs core
or third party), so I definitely welcome their absence. It's mostly just
noise, because the change descriptions alone are not very telling. I'm
only interested in the kind of information you get from version control
systems (i.e., commented diffs), not something like "Added feature foo"
or "Fixed bug in bar".

(I can see that a short summary of user-visible changes since the last
version might be useful for third-party libraries, but that's obviously
not what Drew has in mind here (just have a look at the humongous change
logs in his own libraries :-)))

FWIW, I also find `Todo:' more, not less, important than `Change Log:'.

Štěpán