As far as I am concerned, the problem with ChangeLogs is one with the format rather than one with having files called ChangeLog. (The GNU Coding Standards have permitted automatic generation of ChangeLog at release time from version control information since 1996.)
The main issues I see with the format are: (a) It's a format designed for pre-VCS days and thus involves writing descriptions that duplicate what's plain from reading the change itself, rather than descriptions that are written on the basis that readers have access to the change itself and so the description can better concentrate on a higher-level overview of the changes and information that isn't obvious simply from reading them. (b) It forces all descriptions to be at the level of describing what changed in each individual named entity in the source code, whether or not that is the most helpful level for understanding that particular change (and whether or not entity names either exist or are convenient for the ChangeLog - a convention designed for C function names works less well for C++). I think that for many projects these outweigh the benefits from forcing someone to read through all their changes carefully to write the ChangeLog entry. In the discussions on bug-standards, RMS was amenable to removing the requirement for ChangeLog format and the per-entity descriptions of what changed - *if* a sufficiently good tool is provided to produce a list of the names of the entities changed by a commit. I don't see such a tool as being useful - I think the cases where people might use such lists can all be adequately addressed using existing git facilities to e.g. search for changes to an entity rather than list entities involved in a change. But I haven't managed to persuade RMS of that. So, if someone write the entity-listing tool, we should be able to get the GNU Coding Standards requirement for ChangeLog format removed (whether or not it's still necessary to generate some kind of log of changes at release time and put it in a file called ChangeLog). The tool should be able to handle, at least, the main cases where diff hunk headers get the name of the changed entity wrong (when the relevant funcname line is inside the hunk rather than before it, when the changed entity is a #define, at least). https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-standards/2018-05/msg00011.html If the requirement is removed from the GNU Coding Standards, individual GNU packages can then make their own decisions about whether to keep using ChangeLog format or not. -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
