[Releasing] [Development] Change file process & improvement proposal

[Edward Welbourne]

Kai Koehne (10 February 2017 16:21) wrote:
> To sum the discussion here and also on gerrit up : There's no
> consensus on making [ChangeLog] entries mandatory, or making the
> [ChangeLog] field enabled by default.

Indeed.

> Anyhow, Ossi had an interesting third suggestion on
> https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/183244/:

>> how about this for an idea: we add a new gerrit category "ChangeLog"
>> which needs a +1. it would be auto-set by the bot if a changelog file
>> is touched, otherwise a reviewer needs to set it. easy to implement,
>> reliable (well, as much as the reviewers), and adds no noise to the
>> commit messages.

Note that this speaks of "a changelog file" rather than tags in commits;
I do think this is a better approach, although I do also exhort everyone
to keep your changelog files organised on some *other* model than "make
each addition at the end" - e.g. sort by category, like the existing
ChangeLog tags, and put related changes near each other - since any
model that makes all additions at the same place *will* get conflicts
all the time.  Anything to ensure contemporary changes happen in
different places is better than always conflicting.

> I understand that this would not be hard to do. This way nobody is
> forced to write changelog entries, but it requires a conscious click
> from the reviewer to say 'Yes, this does _not_ use a ChangeLog'.
>
> Any strong opinion against this?

Not from this quarter; if Ossi can teach Gerrit to remind me to think
about whether each change, that lacks one, wants a change log; that
sounds like a good solution to me.  Be sure to include a link to the
wiki page that says what tags to use and what should be in the change
log.

	Eddy.