[geeklog-devel] Updating the changelog

[Dirk Haun]

Quoting Vincent Furia <vfuria at gmail.com>:

> I wonder if we really need to maintain a separate change log any longer, or
> if we do, if we can't just generate it from the Mercurial Log. It seems
> silly to have the information (what changed) maintained in multiple
> locations...

The Mercurial log contains too much noise to be useful. When we change  
things during development, we don't want all of those commits to show  
up in a changelog - only the result is of interest. We could try  
filtering, but that would require everyone to stick to a certain  
format for commit messages. My experience is that this isn't working  
(I see it at work all the time), especially considering that we are  
trying to encourage newcomers to send patches, who may not be familiar  
with our format then (in a Mercurial export file, the commit message  
is part of the patch).

What we do at work is to generate the changelog from our bugtracker  
(JIRA - haven't checked what Mantis offers in terms of APIs). But even  
there we had to add a field "summary for the changelog" and have a  
person performing the task of an editor to ensure that what ends up in  
the changelog is presentable to our customers ...

But if we were to automate extraction of the changelog from the  
bugtracker, it would we easy to do just that. I.e. run the process,  
check contents, edit description where necessary, re-run process.

bye, Dirk