Re: Hash out a solution for ChangeLog/NEWS at the Cauldron?

[Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh at redhat dot com>]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2015 at 10:56:20AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> We already do something like this for GNU Emacs, for Coreutils, for Grep,
> etc. All of these projects generate ChangeLog files from the commit log.  I
> suggest looking at Jim Meyering's gitlog-to-changelog script that comes with
> Gnulib.  It handles Signed-off-by:, Co-authored-by:, and
> Copyright-paperwork-exempt: tags.

Awesome, this makes things much easier.  I'll take a look and make a
similar proposal for glibc.

> The Emacs developers have a more-conservative approach, which involves not
> just automatically generating ChangeLogs from git commit logs, but also
> makes it easy to do manual edits to the generated ChangeLogs later, to allow
> "changing history".  (The Gnulib script also does this, but in a way that's

Great, that solves my problem of an incorrect commit log potentially
generating an incorrect ChangeLog file.

> harder to use.)  This is a wrapper around the Gnulib script, which also
> supports a few other features specific to Emacs ChangeLog files.  See
> Emacs's build-aux/gitlog-to-emacslog script.  Emacs identifies bug numbers
> by having strings of the form "Bug#234234" somewhere in the commit log;
> other projects tend to use "http://bugs.gnu.org/234234";.

We already have a similar convention to automatically update the bug
in bugzilla, so it should not be too hard to use that information to
generated a list of bugs fixed for the release.

> Generating NEWS automatically might be a tougher nut to crack; not sure it's
> worth it.

Joseph has a preference for maintaining the file with the NEWS items
and I think that is fine.  The release process could simply make the
bug number list and prepend that to the NEWS file.

Siddhesh