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

Peter Tyser
2010-05-05T16:03:26Z

Hi Wolfgang,

> In message <n2med82fe3e1005050756i7f91e365z91ce1bf19d382537@mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> >
> > I agree with Kim. Is there anyone besides you who uses CHANGELOG? If
> > not, then maybe it should be deleted from the repository. I don't see
> > why you can't run a script to regenerate it when you need it.
>
> The thing is that I use it all the time. grepping there is often more
> efficient for me then using git log --grep.

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may be slightly out of date.

If you do prefer the speed of looking at a CHANGELOG file, its easy to
generate one when you require it.

> Does it hurt you?

'hurt' is a strong word, but it certainly annoys me too. Eg:
- Every time someone greps they have to visually ignore the CHANGELOG
file hits, or alternately make a grep wrapper script specific to u-boot
that strips out CHANGELOG hits.
- Its a duplication of data that's already stored in the repository
history. Who likes duplicated data?
- For any change that is automated via a script/grep/sed/etc one needs
to filter out the CHANGELOG files.

I don't know if this is much cleaner, but:
$ V=2010.03
$ PREFIX=u-boot-${V}
$ git archive --format=tar --prefix=${PREFIX}/ v${V} | tar -xC ~/tmp
$ git log > ~/tmp/${PREFIX}/CHANGELOG
$ tar -cj -f ~/tmp/${PREFIX}.tar.bz2 -C ~/tmp/ ${PREFIX}
$ rm -fr ~/tmp/${PREFIX}

We could also follow Linux's lead and upload the CHANGELOG as a separate
file from the source. eg there would be a CHANGELOG-{V} for each
released U-Boot version detailing only what changed since the last
release (www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/), or alternatively one
mega-CHANGELOG like we're doing now if people prefer.

Best,
Peter