[U-Boot] [PATCH 2/2] remove main CHANGELOG file

Peter Tyser
2010-05-05T20:37:22Z

Hi Wolfgang,

> > Could you describe what you use CHANGELOG for? I often look at logs,
> > but 99% of the time its a log of a specific file or directory to trace a
> > bug, see why feature X was added, etc. I rarely look at the
> > repositories entire log, and if I do, I use 'git log'. Although 'git
> > log' takes longer, its guaranteed to be accurate, unlike CHANGELOG which
> > may be slightly out of date.
>
> Most frequently I use it in combination with some form of grep command
> (grep, agrep etc.); sometimes I use it in vi/view for manual searching
> / reading.

I still don't grasp what the common use of looking at U-Boot's entire
changelog is. What are some common tasks that require grepping U-Boot's
entire changelog? Are these tasks performed frequently enough that the
extra <1 second 'git log' requires is bothersome?

<snip>

> 3) it delivers only the lines I cactually search for, while "git log
> 4) I can use arbitrary grep options. I am not aware of a git
> 5) I can use other tools to process the messages, like agrep for fuzzy

As Scott mentioned, these can be solved via 'git grep | <cmd>'.

> > If you do prefer the speed of looking at a CHANGELOG file, its easy to
> > generate one when you require it.
>
> Yes, I know. But I also want it available to those who don't use git,
> so it should to be included in the release tarball, and in the
> auto-generated tarballs when using the "snapshot" links on the web
> interface; for example try:
>
> -> wget -O u-boot.tgz 'http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot.git;a=snapshot;sf=tgz'

For snapshots, the CHANGELOG file is going to be out of date though.
It'll only list the changes that occurred up to the previous release.
This seems worse than not having a CHANGELOG at all as its actively
misleading people as to what changes their source code has.

<snip>

> > - For any change that is automated via a script/grep/sed/etc one needs
> > to filter out the CHANGELOG files.
>
> You probably need to exclude a number of other files as well?

I think in general you'd want to update all files other than CHANGELOG.
As a concrete example, the following is a snippet from a script used for
the recent directory reorganization:

git grep lib_$ARCH | grep -v CHANGELOG | sed s/:.*$// | uniq | xargs perl -pi -e "s/lib_$ARCH/arch\/$ARCH\/lib/"

I'll quit whining, just wanted to give my +1 for removing the changelog.

Best,
Peter