@council: We need to discuss ways to improve the current policy. See below.

On 06/07/11 23:09, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 07, 2011 16:47:29 Dane Smith wrote:
>> To be perfectly blunt, no small part of what caused this current fiasco
>> was this exact attitude. I don't like the current policy either, it's
>> far too wide. However, if you go back and look at why it even *got* to
>> council, it was because you (and others), decided that they weren't
>> going to give any regard to the requests of some of their fellow devs
>> about ChangeLogging removals.
It was not only that, and the situation escalated as people tried to
lawyer around instead of doing something productive like writing a perl
script to wrap the "nonsense" so they can ignore it.

Result was an unambiguous policy so that no lawyering happens and all
ChangeLogs make sense.

> 
> how is this relevant at all ?  i dont find value in these entries, other 
> people do.  my attitude towards how worthless they are has 0 bearing on the 
> policy towards creating it.

So you say that you want to follow the rules but accidentally forgot it?

Since it has caused so much trouble I'd like to see it discussed and
improved by the council. I disagreed with the initial strict wording,
and I think the fallout has shown that we need to find a common ground
so that no one feels he has to ignore the rules.

> if you want useless information, then automate it.  there's no reason at all 
> to not do so.  i prefer to keep useful information in the changelogs of 
> packages i maintain without cluttering up with noise.
> -mike

Here's the problem. Useful depends a lot on the context.
Sometimes I only care about a new addition. Sometimes I care about when
and how a patch was introduced. Sometimes I care about removals because
some monkey has broken things for me.

In all cases I want one resource to look at, viewcvs is a horrible and
slow interface. So it does make sense to keep changelogs filled with
information - maybe automation is needed, I don't have a strong opinion
either way. But don't make me do more work because you are lazy, that
never ends well.

-- 
Patrick Lauer         http://service.gentooexperimental.org

Gentoo Council Member and Evangelist
Part of Gentoo Benchmarks, Forensics, PostgreSQL, KDE herds