Re: Generating GNU-style Changelog from git commits

["Marcus D. Hanwell" <marcus.hanwell@kitware.com>]

On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 8:53 PM, Chris Packham <judge.packham@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/04/11 10:46, David Chanters wrote:
>>
>> [Please Cc me on replies.  Thanks!]
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Some projects maintain a ChangeLog file, which looks something like this:
>>
>> 2011-01-01  David Chanters<d.c@example.com>
>>         * foo/bar.c (some_function):
>>          Changed static variable in some_function to auto.
>>
>> etc., etc.
>>
>> Here "foo" is some directory relative to the top-level directory the
>> .git one is in.
>>
>> These ChangeLog files are maintained manually, irrespective of the/any
>> revision control system in use.  I am wondering if it's possible if
>> the project is in Git to be able to automatically append to such a
>> ChangeLog file with each commit automatically, and have it formatted
>> in the style above.
>>
>> Is this possible?  Is it a solved problem?  If not, and I wanted to
>> try myself, could someone point me at the git-specific tools I'd need
>> to know to use to achieve it?
>
> Shouldn't be to hard, there are numerous hooks that could be used either on
> the developer end (post-commit), on the server end (post-update) or even
> when a maintainer applies a patch (post-applypatch). See githooks(5) for
> more info on what hooks are available and what args are passed.
>
> There is also the possibility of generating this changelog at the time of
> release. I'd advocate this approach as it would allow you to edit the
> changelog to make it more useful to readers.

Something I wrote a few years ago does this for us. It may not be
perfect, but there was a desire to have a Changelog in our released
tarballs,

https://github.com/cryos/avogadro/blob/master/scripts/gitlog2changelog.py

If there are better ways of doing this I would certainly be
interested, but have not spent much time on this since writing the
initial script. We had a similar desire, but didn't want to end up
resolving conflicts around a file in version control.

Marcus