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On Sun, Jul 30, 2017 at 5:27 PM, Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××.uk> wrote: |
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> On Sunday 30 Jul 2017 11:02:41 Rich Freeman wrote: |
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> |
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>> The general sense is that Changelogs represent the old way of doing |
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>> things. Most projects have gone away from having them, or they just |
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>> auto-generate them from git. I don't think most projects routinely |
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>> distribute them either - they just stick them on a webpage and only |
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>> people who care about them look at them. The linux kernel only |
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>> includes the changes in the last release in their change logs as well |
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>> (which is nothing more than a dump of git log). |
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> |
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> This has me a bit bothered, wearing my ISO9000 hat. Change logs seem to me |
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> to be the most important traceability tool we can have. Is it not essential |
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> to be able to demonstrate clearly how we got to where we are today? |
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> Preferably without having to jump through a load of abstruse hoops. |
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Git tells you everything that Changelogs did, and more. It isn't all |
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that obscure either, considering that just about everybody is using |
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it. Aside from the fact that nobody has gotten around to fixing the |
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hash function it also can provide gpg-signed histories that are |
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pretty-much impossible to tamper with. |
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|
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In the case of Gentoo they can also track correlated changes across |
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the entire repository and not just per-package histories. If somebody |
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changes 3 packages at the same time, git will show that they changed 3 |
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packages at the same time. With the old changelogs you'd have to hunt |
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through all of them to find out that 3 things were changed with the |
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timestamp, but it wasn't actually atomic. |
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The one thing I will say about git is that you'll never appreciate it |
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until you understand how it works. In many ways git is a data model |
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masquerading as a version control system. The data model is very |
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elegant, but also very different to what came before, and until you |
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understand it you'll be copy/pasting commands off of webpages that |
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don't seem very intuitive. |
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|
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-- |
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Rich |
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