Time to cull the changelog file

[Francois Gouget]

On Sat, 24 May 2008, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
[...]
> Actually I was thinking of simply no longer maintaining a Changelog
> file. It made sense in the days of CVS to store changeset information,
> but now with git the same information and more can be retrieved
> trivially with git-log, and the linear log format won't work so well
> once we start having multiple branches.
> 
> Objections?  Does anybody feel a strong need for a Changelog file?

Users who get Wine as a precompiled package, maybe through their 
distribution, won't be able to easily run git-log or git-whatchanged. I 
know I often check the changelog in /usr/share/doc/<packagename> when I 
have trouble with a Debian package. So I think a changelog should still 
be included in the Wine packages.

It does not have to, and probably shouldn't, list all changes made in 
the past 15 years though. I'll leave determining the best cutoff date to 
others. Also this could potentially be handled by the Wine packager 
rather than being part of the Wine sources. Finally, the individual 
commit messages may not be the easiest thing to understand for 
non-developpers either. I think this is more true of Wine than of other 
packages. That could argue for a changelog that's not just a collection 
of the commit messages. Maybe something culled from the ANNOUNCE 
messages, though these tend to be too terse, imho. Of course the trouble 
is that this would require quite a bit of work.


Anyway, these were just my 2 EuroCents.

-- 
Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr>              http://fgouget.free.fr/
  Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment
                               -- Barry LePatner