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

[Joerg Bornemann]

On 26/01/2017 13:28, Kai Koehne wrote:

> Jani's proposal is to fix parts of this is to encourage committers and reviewers to write [ChangeLog] entries as part of the commit. This could be encouraged by
> * Enabling the [ChangeLog] line by default in the commit template
> * Enforcing a [ChangeLog] entry by the Sanity Bot (under conditions xxx)
>
> For the sanity bot, either we decide that _every_ change has a [ChangeLog], or we try to make the bot intelligent enough to decide whether a commit needs a change log, or not. Parts of the discussion so far makes me think that this will be an uphill battle though.
>
> So, any strong opinion against enforcing a [ChangeLog] line, with "[ChangeLog] -" for commits that don't need one?

Yes, people who cannot be bothered to write a [ChangeLog] line will just 
add "[ChangeLog] -" to their local template to reduce the overall 
bossing around from the sanity bot. Then we've gained nothing but a bag 
of noise in the git log.

If anything, enable the [ChangeLog] line in the commit template. The 
manual action to remove or comment out this line should be enough to 
remind people of their changelog duty - unless they're using a custom 
template which you cannot prevent.

I claim that you won't find an automatic enforcement that makes manual 
intervention superfluous when creating change logs. As others already 
implied, this problem must be solved on a social level.


BR,

Joerg