Re: [gentoo-dev] Council May Summary: Changes to ChangeLog handling

[Brian Harring]

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 04:03:42PM +0400, Peter Volkov wrote:
> В Птн, 20/05/2011 в 13:19 +0300, Mart Raudsepp пишет:
> > On T, 2011-05-17 at 13:32 +0300, Petteri Räty wrote:
> > > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20110510-summary.txt
> > >
> > > Please note that you must now update ChangeLog with each commit. For
> > > more information please see the meeting log and the preceding mailing
> > > list thread:
> > >
> > > http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20110510.txt
> > > http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_eaefa325b31360324d0fe53d0b9071e6.xml
>
> So, I just realized that we have to update Changelogs for everything,
> whitespaces and comments included. Even after reading meeting logs I
> still wonder, why council have decided to vote policy change that was
> not supported even by minority of developers?

The majority support changelog maintenance for non-trivial changes; 
meaning removals, additions, eclass/eapi changes, changing logic, 
fixing build issues, etc.  That's not really arguable, and for those 
who don't support it- they're bluntly, wrong, the ChangeLog isn't for 
devs (we have vcs logs after all)- it's for users, and that's the sort 
of thing they need to see.

The problem is, that's a *fuzzy* definition.  Quoting myself from the 
meeting:

19:37 <@ferringb> Arfrever: the kicker is, in certain cases, you're 
partally right.
19:37 <@ferringb> Arfrever: the reality is, people will just adhere to 
the letter of the law rather than the intent
19:37 <@ferringb> we already had that occur with removal
19:38 <@ferringb> stupid that we have to essentially legislate common 
sense, but that's what it is right now ;)
19:39 < NeddySeagoon> ferringb, common sense is much rarer that you 
might think :)
19:39 <@ferringb> NeddySeagoon: well aware

If someone has a definition that is commonsense, then propose it- the 
current "you must log everything" is very, very heavy handed and 
basically was a forced situation since QA cannot make folks behave 
when the rules are reliant on common sense.

We cannot have situations where devs adhere to the exact wording of 
the rules but violate the spirit, which is exactly what got us into 
this mess in the first place.

Proposals to refine changelog maintenance I'm definitely open to- I 
very much hate that the situation basically forced us to go heavy 
handed, but the reality is, w/out the rules QA can't do anything about 
misbehaving folks- if they try, the argument becomes "I've not 
violated any rules!".  If QA is able to make decisions/actions on 
their own without mapping directly back to rules, offenders start 
claiming "the cabal is after me, I've not done anything wrong!".

Basically, it's being stuck between a rock and hard place.  Not sure 
there is a solution there either.

As said, come up w/ a proposal for that, closing the loopholes and I'm 
very much interested; however you'll have a hell of a time trying to 
define "non-trivial" in a manner that blocks people pulling 
shenanigans.


> The whole idea after human
> editable ChangeLogs was to avoid whitespace changes and changes in
> comments. In the current state it is possible to generate them on rsync
> servers and avoid this burden.
>
> I would like council to update policy to allow exclude whitespace
> changes and changes in comments.

It'll be on the schedule.

~harring