Re: Updating "contribution Checklist" to recommend git format-patch.

[Joseph Myers <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2018, Carlos O'Donell wrote:

> We should not require people to use git-show-gnu scripts, and
> all developers should have the Changelog merge helper to make
> it easy to commit such patches.

I don't think expecting people to have special repository merge setup is 
any better than saying ChangeLog entries should, when a patch is 
submitted, be included in the submitted commit message but not the 
submitted diffs.

I think the way to eliminate ChangeLog issues for glibc patch submissions 
and commits is for someone to implement the program RMS wants to list 
entities changed by a git commit (including in particular the case where 
the funcname names are within the diff hunk and so the name in the hunk 
header is missing or is that of the previous function), so that the GNU 
Coding Standards can change to allow not using ChangeLog files and using 
commit messages that are not suitable for generating ChangeLog files 
because they do not use ChangeLog format and do not describe what changed 
in individual named entities unless that's a useful part of explanation 
for the particular commit, and then for glibc to choose to adopt the 
option of stopping using ChangeLog files and ChangeLog-style commit 
messages.

(If such changes to the GNU Coding Standards still require a ChangeLog 
file in release tarballs listing changes but not divided up by named 
entities as in the present ChangeLog format, I expect we'd put the output 
of "git log --stat" for a relevant commit range in the ChangeLog file just 
before making the release tag.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com