[Kolab-devel] Updating ChangeLog?

[Sascha Wilde]

Hi Jeroen,

(I slightly reordered the quotes text to keep related topics together, I
hope you don't mind.)

"Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)" <vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com> writes:
> We may, possibly, somewhere down the road, consider having the changelog 
> generated from the commits made from...to a certain point in time as well,

I agree, that this is a good idea in general.  But it creates high demands
on the quality of commit messages and it suffers from the fact, that
commit messages can not be changed after the commit (a feature I'm
actually missing from hg), so I'm not sure if it is really
practicable...

> Please consider updating the ChangeLog in a separate commit.

I object.  To my understanding it is common best practice in all
changeset based SCMs to have all changes which belong semantically
together in one atomic changeset.  And the documentation of the made
changes in the ChangeLog is semantically strongly tied to the changes
them self:
  The documentation makes no sense without the changes, and the changes
should not exist without the documentation.

So -- when ever possible -- I'd say the ChangeLog updates belong in the
_same_ commit as the changes them self.

> updating ChangeLog in the same commit as making codebase changes is the number 
> one issue merges do not work.

I don't really understand the problem:  I assume by "merges do not work"
you mean that manual merging of the ChangeLog is needed, but as you will
have to manually merge the ChangeLog entries anyway (as you want to keep
it up to date after the code merge) I don't see the advantage of an
separate changeset here.  Can you please explain?

cheers
sascha
-- 
Sascha Wilde                                          OpenPGP key: 4BB86568
http://www.intevation.de/~wilde/                  http://www.intevation.de/
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