Re: Git, merging, and News/Relnotes files

["Dmitry Potapov" <dpotapov@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Edward Z. Yang
<edwardzyang@thewritingpot.com> wrote:
> As a policy on a project that I manage, almost every commit warrants a
> change to our NEWS (changelog) file, which end-users can browse to get
> an in-depth idea of the changes that have happened from the last
> release. If it's an added feature, the changelog includes a description
> of how to use it; if it's a fixed bug, it briefly describes what
> happened. Internal changes may or may not get added, depending on the
> visibility of the APIs affected.

I believe it is better to put all this information directly to the commit
message using some special tagging, so you can extract it automatically
at the release time and generate the changelog file for users. You may
edit the generated changelog and commit it directly before release.

Having one file changed on almost every commit is not a good idea, and
not only because it will cause unnecessary conflicts but also it may
considerable increase the size of the whole repository. By default, the
delta compression has limit 50, which means that every 50 change of file
will become its full copy. If the changelog file is changed very often
and it is long, it may turn out that changelog alone takes as much space
as the rest of the source tree.

Dmitry