[ On Thursday, July 12, 2001 at 19:04:03 (-0500), Frederick Bruckman wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Please stop change logs in CVS commit messages
>
> > I know what the contents of doc/pkg-CHANGES looks like -- thats why I
> > suggested its commits could be done programmatically.
> 
> I have no idea what that means.

It means you write a little script that pkgsrc committers run every time
they update or add a package and that script creates both the entry in
the doc/pkg-CHANGES file and does the commit of doc/pkg-CHANGES with a
log message formatted as I described.

> You asked for a whole bunch of stuff
> to go into those commit messages, and that's all I'm objecting to.

I asked for nothing more than what's usually already there now, except
for some consistency in its form and completeness.

> The commit log for that file is going to be silly, no matter how you
> look at it.

It won't be silly in any way so long as it follows the specifications I
outlined.

Yes it'll be extra information for anyone who does a "cvs log", but it
won't be for anyone reading the commit messages independently (eg. on
the source-changes list).  People looking at the change history of the
*CHANGES files will still have to use "cvs diff" to make any heads or
tails of what happened anyway, so providing this information in the
commit log isn't silly or extraneous since the reason for doing so is to
get it to the mailing list, not just to put it in the commit message.

> Either you duplicate half of the information in the commit
> logs for the entire tree (dumb), or you repeat the information in the
> change (just silly).

If you would try to look at this from the point of view of someone who's
not a developer and who reads source-changes then I think you'll begin
to see that my suggestion is not at all silly in any way.

If you're going to give us this information then make

> Maybe we should split out netbsd-doc-changes?

No, that would be silly and unproductive.  I think readers of
source-chanes still want to see non-pkgsrc changes to doc.

I would be OK to move doc/pkg-CHANGES to pkgsrc/CHANGES though, but if
pkgsrc-related commit messages (i.e. those to the pkg-CHANGES file) are
to be mixed in with source-changes then please make them useful but
succinct and consistent.

The only other alternative would be to not require any commit message in
commits to doc/*CHANGES files _AND_ to not post any such messages to any
of the *-changes mailing lists.  However that would hide any changes
which were not simple updates to those files, and so that wouldn't
really be sane either.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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