From: Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>
To: Torvald Riegel <triegel@redhat.com>
Cc: Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>,
Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>, <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>
Subject: Re: Update copyright dates not handled by scripts/update-copyrights [committed]
Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2017 17:19:58 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1701021703510.24470@digraph.polyomino.org.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1483371772.13143.93.camel@redhat.com>
On Mon, 2 Jan 2017, Torvald Riegel wrote:
> > The newer logs are a matter of the GNU Coding Standards. That is, if you
> > don't want to maintain information about "what" changed in that particular
> > form, you should be persuading the GCS maintainers to allow just logging
> > descriptions of what and why changed at the logical level rather than the
> > level of individual files and functions (in the case where a version
> > control system provides tracking of the "what" ... not all GNU packages
> > have public version control).
>
> Are you saying that from your point of view, GCS is the only significant
> reason for maintaining changelogs?
My suggestion is that it would be reasonable to argue to the GCS
maintainers that ChangeLog-format logs need not be maintained for a
package for which all of the following are true:
* it has public version control,
* in a distributed VCS,
* where commits are made for each logical change, not batched into a
commit per release (see bash for an example of such batching) or per day
or other such batching,
* with authors not just committers tracked,
* with commit messages describing the logical "what" changed (but not
describing the physical "what" at the level of changes to individual files
and functions).
That is, when all the above are true, the information about changes is
more usefully available through the VCS than through ChangeLog-style
messages and people wanting that information will be expecting to go to
the VCS for it rather than to find it in the release tarballs, so
ChangeLog-style messages can be considered obsoleted by the VCS in that
case (and in that case, the GCS requirements for ChangeLog files do not
serve a useful technical purpose - this is a separate matter from any
legal reasons there might be for including such information about changes
and their authorship in release tarballs).
> Maybe we should just announce that we'll stop doing changelogs and see
> whether anybody complains. If people complain, it would be interesting
That's not an appropriate way to work for a GNU package. We need to work
with the GNU project (and quite possibly, the FSF in turn work with their
lawyers to establish if there are any legal reasons relating to
attribution of changes within releases).
If the GCS were then changed along the lines I propose above, we'd still
need to establish appropriate conventions for commit message contents -
that is, that any nontrivial change should include a description in the
commit message along the lines of what goes in the mailing list posting of
the patch. But we can of course establish such a rule for meaningful
commit messages independently of a change to the GCS.
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-01-02 17:20 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 21+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-01-01 0:27 Update copyright dates not handled by scripts/update-copyrights [committed] Joseph Myers
2017-01-01 7:22 ` Florian Weimer
2017-01-01 9:57 ` Mike Frysinger
2017-01-02 15:08 ` Torvald Riegel
2017-01-02 15:23 ` Joseph Myers
2017-01-02 15:42 ` Torvald Riegel
2017-01-02 17:19 ` Joseph Myers [this message]
2017-01-02 17:27 ` Joseph Myers
2017-01-02 18:03 ` Torvald Riegel
2017-01-02 17:55 ` Torvald Riegel
2017-01-02 18:01 ` Joseph Myers
2017-01-02 18:03 ` Torvald Riegel
2017-01-02 13:45 ` Joseph Myers
2017-01-02 13:55 ` Florian Weimer
2017-01-02 14:00 ` Joseph Myers
2017-01-02 15:50 ` Paul Eggert
2017-01-02 17:22 ` Joseph Myers
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2020-01-01 0:22 Joseph Myers
2019-01-01 0:16 Joseph Myers
2018-01-01 0:41 Joseph Myers
2016-01-04 16:27 Joseph Myers
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