Re: Replacement for cvs2cl, for generating ChangeLog

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Robin Rosenberg <robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com> writes:

> tisdag 27 februari 2007 13:57 skrev Andy Parkins:
>> On Tuesday 2007 February 27 11:41, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> 
>> > * How do I discard all locally modified or added files?  'cvs upd -C'
>> >   does some of that, but I've been using a tool 'cvsco' which quickly
>> >   restore a CVS checkout into a pristine state.
>> 
>> Not that I know of, but git has some lovely log generation tools, so I'm sure 
>> it could be easily done with a snippet of perl - or perhaps a change to git's 
>> own log generator to support
>> 
>>  git-rev-list --pretty=gnucl
>> 
> gir-rev-list ??
>
> Extend git-shortlog with --gnucl instead. What seems missing is the grouping
> of changes by date. git-shortlog only groups by author.

If GNU changelog _were_ to have one entry per day, mixing
changes from different commits together, that might be a good
approach. I do not think GNU changelog guideline can be _THAT_
broken.

Listing of filenames of changed files in the log, followed by
short description of the nature of the change (e.g. "Updated to
do blah", "New File"), shows the CVS mentality "File matters",
and that was what Simon's original example showed.  It's been a
while I looked at the coding guideline the last time, but I
think GNU convention wants you to say "filename (function)" when
applicable.  Which I happen to think makes much more sense than
the filename alone.

The information that would appear in "log -p --pretty" output
needs to be condensed to obtain such a log entry.  You _could_
still do that as a built-in if you really wanted to, but I tend
to think that it is much better to implement such a specialized
processing (for one thing, what a function is depends on the
programming language you are reading from) as an external
postprocessing filter that people can more easily tweak for
their specific needs.

That's why I keep stressing that one good thing about git is it
is easily scriptable.