[bind10-dev] (re) NEWS vs. ChangeLog

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2013, JINMEI Tatuya / ???? wrote:

> The original message doesn't seem to be delivered, so I'm making a new
> thread...
> 
> > At a recent conference call, we discussed a little about purpose of 
> > ChangeLog and NEWS file.
> >
> > I made a quick branch:  trac2660
> >
> > This moved the ChangeLog to NEWS.
> 
> First off, I didn't understand what was wrong with current ChangeLog
> and I still don't understand it.  If that was about content of
> ChangeLog, just moving it to a different file doesn't solve the
> problem.  So could you explain your motivation of separating these
> with the new ChangeLog, clarifying what was the problem of our current
> practice and how trac2660 solves it?
> 

The ticket and work for trac2660 are not for the initial problem.

The initial problem was that the existing changelog was inconsistent and 
somewhat undefined. (For example, entries about DHCP "options" did not 
mention "DCHP". Also some entries vaguely mention about API changes 
while other entries specifically name the functions or classes that had 
usage changes.)

That discussion brought up on the phone call that our normal usage of 
ChangeLog is normally done using NEWS file (per common GNU or 
autoconf/automake-based projects).  On the call, I also mentioned 
briefly about X.org's way for doing the changelog.  So I made a ticket 
for those two ideas.

As for the initial problem -- lack of good procedure for what needs to 
be listed for the news and release announcements -- is not done yet.

> > And then added a make target to generate the ChangeLog from the git 
> > commit message history.  This was based on code used by the X.org 
> > project.
> >
> > One minor problem is that the ChangeLog is huge. (X.org at least is 
> > split up into many, many, components, so some changelogs are small. But 
> > as a comparison, libX11 ChangeLog is near 1MB and xorg-server is 3MB.) 
> > The BIND10 ChangeLog is 3MB. Our tarball is currently around 5MB. This 
> > will bring it to around 6MB I estimate.  The ChangeLog would not be kept 
> > in the git repo, just in the "dist" generated tarballs.
> > 
> > (I'd like to extend the changelog generation to put at the top: "See the 
> > NEWS file for summaries of important changes.")
> > 
> > The NEWS file would include the summaries of noticable changes or 
> > other important news like we already do. It is re-used for release 
> > announcements also.
> >
> > Any comments or thoughts on this?