Re: To ChangeLog or not to ChangeLog, that is the question
At 04:29 PM 6/26/98 +0100, Kyle Jones wrote:
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.
Agree 100%. The beauty of CVS is completely trashed if you don't know what
happened. I have tracked down many bugs as Kyle describes both in XEmacs
and on commercial projects that I work on. As an example we were close to
shipping a software release of something when dialog input boxes stopped
working. By looking at the code you couldn't tell what was wrong but by
finding the change (a one-liner on the face of it purely cosmetic) it
became evident. I believe that sometimes its the small changes for which
information is more important.
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.
Agree 100%.
I don't think patches should be rejected for not having changelogs but I
certainly don't think we should change policy from changelogs being
requested for all patches.
andy
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" .sigs are like your face - rarely seen by you and uglier than you think"
Dr Andy Piper, Technical Architect, Parallax Solutions Ltd
mail: andyp(a)parallax.co.uk web: www.parallax.co.uk/~andyp