[Development] ChangeLogs

Eskil Abrahamsen Blomfeldt eskil.abrahamsen-blomfeldt at digia.com
Fri Jan 18 09:54:37 CET 2013


On 01/17/2013 04:05 PM, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> we introduce a new footer ("ChangeLog:") to commit messages. this would
> shift the burden to the contributor, and it could be properly reviewed.
> the generation the logs could be fully automated, and only minimal
> redactional work would be necessary.
> a (somewhat minor) downside would be some redundancy in the commit
> messages.
> don't suggest to change the style of the commit summaries to be
> ready-made changelog entries - this would be neither without
> disadvantages (different target audience), nor would it fully solve the
> problem (selection of commits for the changelog).
>
> an alternative would be auto-generating the changelog from jira tasks.
> consequently, if you consider something important enough for a changelog
> entry, you need to create a task for it if there is none yet. i guess
> some metrics guys would looooove that idea, too. for developers, it's of
> course additional work.

I'd prefer adding it to the commit message. There are times when we want 
to link a commit to a task number without having it appear in a commit 
log, e.g. when fixing a regression which was never released or adding 
some internal enablers which would only clutter the changelog and not 
provide any extra value to users. Thus we would either have to add a lot 
of logic to interpret the Jira tasks and try to determine whether it 
should be included in the log or not, or we would have to add the 
possibility of manually overriding it. It just seems like a lot of extra 
potential for committers to break the system.

Having it as part of the commit message seems a lot less complex to me, 
and I don't think it would do any harm to an extra line of 
meta-information in the bottom section with the change-id and 
task-number where there's already lots of clutter.

-- Eskil




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