From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with archive (Exim 4.33) id 1CI3lc-0001bA-Uz for mharc-grub-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 14 Oct 2004 07:27:33 -0400 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.33) id 1CI3la-0001b2-Tb for grub-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 14 Oct 2004 07:27:31 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.33) id 1CI3lW-0001ai-W5 for grub-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 14 Oct 2004 07:27:27 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.33) id 1CI3lW-0001ae-Nv for grub-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 14 Oct 2004 07:27:26 -0400 Received: from [212.43.237.68] (helo=kotoba.storever.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.34) id 1CI3eG-0000dF-8Z for grub-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 14 Oct 2004 07:19:57 -0400 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by kotoba.storever.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8CEBDFF9F3DD for ; Thu, 14 Oct 2004 13:19:51 +0200 (CEST) From: "Yoshinori K. Okuji" Organization: enbug.org To: The development of GRUB 2 Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 13:20:20 +0200 User-Agent: KMail/1.6.1 References: <6C8637B2-1C58-11D9-AD2F-000A95A0560C@penguinppc.org> <0224E79D-1C82-11D9-A7DE-000A95A0560C@penguinppc.org> <87vfdfhg3v.fsf@night.trouble.net> In-Reply-To: <87vfdfhg3v.fsf@night.trouble.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <200410141320.21964.okuji@enbug.org> Subject: Re: ChangeLogs? X-BeenThere: grub-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: The development of GRUB 2 List-Id: The development of GRUB 2 List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 11:27:31 -0000 I'd like to describe additional information on this topic. The ChangeLog has two different purposes: information for tracking bugs and information on copyright. For the latter, it is very important to record who did what at when. "Why" does not matter here. Suppose that you are a contributor to GNU Project and you are hired by a company (or maybe under the control of an university). If you forget to get a disclaimer from your company or the disclaimer is not signed by a proper person, your company might claim that GNU Project is not allowed to use your code. Then, we must detect which part of the code is owned by your company. If you provide only patches, it is too difficult to track all changes made by you. For example, when we have a good ChangeLog, if you made a new function and another person rewrote the function from scratch afterwards, we can just grep the function name and get a conclusion that we don't have to drop the function in one minute. If we don't have any good ChangeLog... you should be able to imagine terrible work. So, we must have a good ChangeLog always. It does not matter whether you use comments with a version control system or a plain-text file. Personally I believe that a plain-text file has more advatanges, but if you need to write logs anyway, is there any reason that you don't want to use the file ChangeLog? I myself do this: 1. Write a change log. 2. Copy the log. 3. Commit my changes to the CVS with a comment pasted. Okuji