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Re: ChangeLog entry complexity
- From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos at redhat dot com>
- To: David Miller <davem at davemloft dot net>
- Cc: pasky at ucw dot cz, roland at hack dot frob dot com, neleai at seznam dot cz, libc-alpha at sourceware dot org
- Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:32:13 -0400
- Subject: Re: ChangeLog entry complexity
- References: <20130311214635 dot 5B9D32C08F at topped-with-meat dot com> <20130325164624 dot GA6137 at machine dot or dot cz> <51508192 dot 90702 at redhat dot com> <20130325 dot 130729 dot 668574637383532905 dot davem at davemloft dot net>
On 03/25/2013 01:07 PM, David Miller wrote:
> From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@redhat.com>
> Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:55:46 -0400
>
>> Does anyone feel strongly that detailed change logs are limiting our
>> acceptance of new developers to the community?
>
> Let's take a real simple example.
>
> I figure out that internal function FOO no longer uses argument X,
> so I'm going to remove argument X from the interface.
>
> There are 1000 call sites.
>
> What value does that 1001 line ChangeLog entry provide?
None in that case. I agree. We don't do much refactoring in glibc,
but you do raise the very good point that writing change notes for
refactoring is a serious issue.
I still don't feel like your example applies to the kinds of patches
we are actually getting on libc-alpha today, but you have made a valid
point about refactoring.
> Absolutely zero, and it's a waste of the submitter's time. I might
> not do the conversion because the ChangeLog is so laborious.
I wouldn't judge you if you did.
> I'm pretty sure most developers don't take the ChangeLog seriously at
> all, and therefore that's a place where errors are happening anyways.
I take them seriously myself and when I do reviews.
> And I know for a fact that many of Ulrich Drepper's large commits
> in the past ommitted many of the changes his patches made. In fact
> he would always commit the ChangeLog update as a completely separate
> commit from the changes themselves.
That's disappointing.
> So you can't even say that the ChangeLog provides a way to search for
> changes, since it is provably non-trivially incomplete.
Also disappointing. Hopefully this is not happening today.
> ChangeLog files are absolutely of zero value when you have powerful
> version control, as we do.
I can agree to a certain degree.
We need someone to lead the community through a transition from a
process we know how to use to one we don't.
If you feel strongly about the issue I would be more than happy
to talk about how we can make this transition happen, but it will
require non-zero work to move us in a new direction. Including
a more thorough discussion on how we perform reviews and what's
expected of a reviewer.
Cheers,
Carlos.