To ChangeLog or not to ChangeLog, that is the question

SL Baur writes: To me it is hard to understand why someone would believe this. I've patched XEmacs extensively, and in all cases writing the ChangeLog entries has helped me unmuddle my thinking. If it helps me just after I've written the code, surely it can do nothing but help someone coming along months or years later. And indeed it has. Reading change entries written by others has helped me track down bugs. Doing that work would have been much more difficult if I'd only had the diffs to use. A sobering fact: When we were trying to figure out who should be on the patch review board we quickly realized that <underline>none of the people currently developing XEmacs understands all of it.</underline> None of us! We hope we have it all covered between the eight people currently on the review board, but that's no help to anyone else who is trying to modify XEmacs. I'll get on the soapbox again, because this message can't be repeated often enough: Maintenance is the largest software development cost. A vote against better documentation is a vote for entropy.