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All, |
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As decided by the Council in its last meeting at the beginning of this |
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month, ChangeLogs will not be generated from VCS commit messages, |
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because the Council wants to keep the ability to edit generated |
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ChangeLog messages [1]. |
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As a result, the Council took this up with the Portage team, to make |
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repoman update the ChangeLog file upon `repoman commit'. |
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Because some of the reasons put forward for autogenerating ChangeLogs |
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was the actual speed of making a commit, repoman does not call |
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echangelog, but instead uses its information about the current state of |
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the VCS directory it already collected to do its QA checks to write a |
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ChangeLog entry directly from Python (in which repoman is written). |
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To facilitate those developers who have echangelog, or their own scripts |
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that do the same, hardwired into their systems, repoman commit will by |
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default *NOT* update the ChangeLog if it is already modified. This |
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allows to run echangelog followed by repoman commit, without getting a |
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double ChangeLog entry. |
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However, this also allows to do all kinds of other actions to the |
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ChangeLog file, without actually adding an entry for the current change |
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being committed, as we've already seen in practice. |
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The Council would like to remind developers that it is still a |
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requirement that all actions are documented in the ChangeLog and that it |
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is hence the responsibility of the committing developer to make sure |
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this requirement is met. |
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Repoman in the most recent Portage versions in the tree, has an |
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--echangelog flag, that takes the argument `y', `n' or `force'. The |
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default for this option can be set to yes or no, and is controlled by |
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metadata/layout.conf. For the `gentoo' (gentoo-x86) repository, this is |
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set to true, which results in the previously described behaviour. |
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When the ChangeLog is modified, but a new entry should still be written |
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by repoman, --echangelog=force will accomplish this. Obviously, passing |
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--echangelog=n makes repoman skip writing a ChangeLog entry at all. |
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The Council hopes to have informed all developers sufficiently through |
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this message. |
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[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20111011-summary.txt |
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-- |
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Fabian Groffen |
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Gentoo on a different level |
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