On 12/22/2017 12:42 PM, Eric Botcazou wrote:
ChangeLogs are a relic from the days before version-control systems with
real changesets. When you have real changesets, all ChangeLogs do is
add unnecessary process friction.
ChangeLogs make it possible to quickly pinpoint unintentional changes going in
the commits. Maybe git has specific counter-measures against them, but that's
useful at least with Subversion.
It's less of a problem with Git because of its support for local
branching, so it's less likely that you reuse the same tree for
different work.
*However*, my main problem with getting rid of ChangeLogs is that
without a pull-request-based contribution procedure or some tool support
like Gerrit, it's impossible to tell which parts of a patch submission
make it into a commit message. For glibc, we regularly have commits
where the commit message is not informative at all, and we don't really
know what will be committed by a contributor before the fact.
Thanks,
Florian