Doing away with changelogs

[Nicolas Williams]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 03:56:11PM -0400, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, April 18, 2006 10:30:54 AM -0400 Alexandra Ellwood 
> <lxs at mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> > It sounds like the problem people use the Changelogs to solve is
> > "what change introduced this new behavior I don't like."
> >
> > I suspect this need would be fulfilled by just improving our release
> > notes so that they list all the bugs fixed and the svn commit lines
> > to show what files were impacted by each change.
> 
> Answering that question in this way also requires that your release notes 
> describe every new bug that was _introduced_ in that release.

Sorry, but "what change introduced this new behavior I don't like" isn't
necessarily obvious no matter how detailed the changelog might be.

Either you can debug the code and root cause your problem on your own or
you need support.

What MIT needs to do here is find the sweet spot between too detailed a
changelog and too empty changelog.

> But yes; if your release notes contained an actual description of every 
> change, that would go a long way toward answering both "what caused this 
> problem" and "will this release fix my problem".  Of course, it would also 
> look an awful lot like a ChangeLog...

Note that Sun includes *synopsis* not *description* text for bugs/RFEs
fixed in patches and updates.  Why should MIT be any different?

What does matter from a development and root causing point of view is
being able to track changesets to bugs fixed by them and associated
descriptions.

Nico
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