Doing away with changelogs

[Kiran Kumar]

Jeff>More importantly, source releases aren't just for people doing development, 
Jeff>and the ChangeLog in a source release _definitely_ isn't for people doing 
Jeff>development.  As I noted earlier, it's for people who want to see what has 
Jeff>changed since some previous release, or between releases.

I would agree with Jeffrey on the need for shipping a standalone 
Changelog along with the sources. It would be of great help to people 
who tend not to track every release from MIT.

-Kiran


Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:

>On Monday, April 17, 2006 05:30:16 PM -0400 Sam Hartman <hartmans at mit.edu> 
>wrote:
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>>>>>>>"Derek" == Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> writes:
>>>>>>>              
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>>No, technically it would be easy to do.  We have mostly decided not to
>>do it because we feel that we'd want to do a manual cleanup pass after
>>generating the changelog and we've decided not to dedicate those
>>resources.
>>    
>>
>
>... but it's OK for everyone who wants to know what has changed to figure 
>out exactly what in svn corresponds to the release and then manually dig 
>through the revision history, when an automated tool could do this once for 
>everyone?
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>>A source release is the sources necessary to build a particular
>>release.
>>
>>To do development you are going to need access to the repository and
>>bugs database.  That's roughly the same as many other open source
>>projects.
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>
>In fact, neither the bug database nor the repository are essential to 
>people doing development.  They're important to _you_, because you're 
>responsible for maintaining the "official" codebase, tracking bugs, and 
>merging people's changes, and because as a group working on a number of 
>projects at any one time, you need a shared, branchable repository. 
>Someone else can download source, add a feature they like, port to a new 
>platform, or whatever, and then send you a patch, and they don't need any 
>access to your repository or bug database.  I've certainly contributed to 
>more than one software project using this model.
>
>More importantly, source releases aren't just for people doing development, 
>and the ChangeLog in a source release _definitely_ isn't for people doing 
>development.  As I noted earlier, it's for people who want to see what has 
>changed since some previous release, or between releases.
>
>
>I don't have much at stake here.  I don't build MIT Kerberos from source, 
>and it's not very often that I ask myself what has changed between 
>releases.  All I can tell you is what I've found working with other 
>software, which is that it's very useful for source distributions to 
>include a ChangeLog, and most of them don't look like they were produced 
>manually.
>
>-- Jeff
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