[augeas-devel] Re: [RFC] Dynamic ChangeLog generation script

[Jim Meyering]

"Jeff Schroeder" <jeffschroed at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 9:19 AM, Jeff Schroeder <jeffschroed at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 1:31 AM, Nicolas Valcarcel
>> <nvalcarcel at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>> Hi!
>>>        I have noticed that the ChangeLog entry on the source it's empty, it
>>> will be really cool if we get track of the changes in there so everyone
>>> knows what's new, so if you are going to change things please use it!
>>
>> hg log works pretty well for now :)
>
> A post on planet.gnome.org told me about an auto-changelog generation
> script hooked into 'make distcheck' for gnome-games. Looking at how they
> did it found these two interesting bits of code:
> http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gnome-games/trunk/Makefile.am?r1=7698&r2=7722
> http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gnome-games/trunk/svn2cl.xsl?view=markup&pathrev=7724

Many people want a ChangeLog file, so since I prefer not to
duplicate that manually in the log and in a version-controlled
file, I now generate ChangeLog (for distribution tarballs only)
from git logs:

For an example, look at coreutils.  It uses gnulib's gitlog-to-changelog
script, along with this rule from coreutils/Makefile.am:

gen_start_date = 2008-02-08
.PHONY: gen-ChangeLog
gen-ChangeLog:
	if test -d .git; then						\
	  $(top_srcdir)/build-aux/gitlog-to-changelog			\
	    --since=$(gen_start_date) > $(distdir)/cl-t;		\
	  rm -f $(distdir)/ChangeLog;					\
	  mv $(distdir)/cl-t $(distdir)/ChangeLog;			\
	fi

There's room for improvement.  Two things on my list:
  - attribute more than one "author" for a single change
  - provide a mechanism to correct in the generated ChangeLog
      errors in the git logs.