ChangeLog rotation (or... eliminating ChangeLogs)

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2017-01-11 at 18:53 +1030, Alan Modra wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 12:11:11PM -0800, Cary Coutant wrote:
> > What's the rationale for rotating ChangeLogs every year? To me, it's
> > much simpler to have a single monolithic file -- especially
> > considering that wildcard substitution puts the files in ascending
> > order, while searching within a file returns results in descending
> > order.
> 
> We haven't been using git for all that long.  With CVS, I believe that
> any changed file is transmitted to the repository in entirety when
> committing (and also for other operations).  Large frequently changed
> files therefore created a network traffic problem on the server.
> Locally too if you were on 300 baud dialup.  :)

In Git only diffs are transmitted so that part is not a big problem.

However, it is frustrating to deal with ChangeLogs because all changes
always come at the front of the file which means every change is always
a conflict that needs to be resolved.

Other GNU tools have changed to use the gitlog-to-changelog utility from
gnulib, then they don't keep changelogs at all as files in the repo:
instead they're generated from the Git log when the package is created.