Automating the maintenance of the ChangeLog file

[Joseph Myers]

On Wed, 21 Nov 2018, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> any change would require arguing with GNU upper management who may be 
> even more attached to them than some of us are.

We *have* agreement from GNU upper management to allow not using the 
existing ChangeLog format (and, thus, have no entity-level descriptions of 
the individual pieces of the changes unless the patch author thinks such a 
description is useful in a particular case), *if* the list of changed 
entities can be generated from the commits reliably enough.  (I failed to 
persuade RMS that the list of named entities for a commit is not 
significantly useful because in practice the problem you tend to have in 
development is the inverse one - given an entity you're looking at for 
some reason, identify past changes to it - which git tools already have 
various ways to address.)

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-standards/2018-05/msg00003.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-standards/2018-05/msg00011.html

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com