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

[Paul Eggert <eggert at cs dot ucla dot edu>]

Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
> One simple solution that comes to my mind is to enforce a structure on
> the commit log, which requires all contributors to the patch to be
> included with Signed-off-by: tags for each contributor (and maybe
> Acked-by too).  The ChangeLog entry can be identified with a
> ChangeLog: tag.  Likewise, we could have a NEWS: tag to identify NEWS
> items for the release and a BUGS: tag to include bugs that this commit
> resolves.

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.

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 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";.

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