Re: Changelogs on kernel.org

jw schultz
2002-05-13T08:57:35Z

On Sun, May 12, 2002 at 08:06:39PM +0000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> In article <20020512010709.7a973fac.spyro@armlinux.org>,
> Ian Molton <spyro@armlinux.org> wrote:
> >
> >I dont know who to write to about this, but the changelogs for
> >2.4.19-pre on kernel.org are COMPLETELY illegible.
>
> Hmm..
>
> You're definitely right about the BK version numbers, since those are
> meaningless anyway (they are only meaningful within one BK tree, and
> they change over time when you merge different trees together.
>
> The 2.4.x changelogs seem to be done with my "release" scripts, but
> additionally they don't have the same kind of detailed information that
> the 2.5.x kernels have, and yes, the result is fairly ugly.
>
> What are peoples opinion about the "full" changelog format that v2.5.x
> kernels have? Should we sort that too by author?
>
> Perl is the obvious choice for doing transformations like these. Is
> anybody willing to write a perl script that does the "sort by author"
> thing?
>
> I'll remove the date/BK ID thing, so that my unsorted changelogs would
> look like the appended thing. But yes, sorting (and merging) by author
> would probably be a good thing. (My BK changelog scripts can also add
> markers around the actual log message, to make parsing easier).
>
> Linus
>

Rather than sort by author i, and i suspect others, would
prefer the top-level sort be by subsystem or a recognizable
aspect (ext2fs, VM, sched, cleanup, etc). That way we could
quickly scan for the patches that relate to areas of
interest. I am aware that currently many patches aren't
even labled suitably but if we start doing this then
eventually it will get better.

Also where a set of patches are included it would be nice if
they could be merged like so:

|<bigenius@northpole.org>
| [devicefs] blah blah blah [1/6]
|
| fixed the whosit
|
|<bigenius@northpole.org>
| [devicefs] blah blah blah [2/6]
|
| improved error report
|
|<bigenius@northpole.org>
| [devicefs] blah blah blah [4/6]
|
| move locking down a layer (requires 1)

Might become

| ** devicefs **
|<bigenius@northpole.org>
| [devicefs] blah blah blah [1,2,4/6]
|
| fixed the whosit
|
| improved error report
|
| move locking down a layer (requires 1)

Of course this would be further down the line.