Re: [ros-dev] Commit log

[Marc Piulachs]

I think using xml is very impractical , commit messages are intended to be written and
consumed by humans; generating, mixing and validating machine friendly content (in this
case xml) with taht it's not a good idea. We can use a more simple aproach like adding
a special keyword that identifies a commit message sentence as a potential changelog
message. For example:

- Content 
- Stop mixing unicode and ANSI strings (@notepad)

- Don't dereference NULL pointers (b:999@user32)

- More content



This content can then be parsed with a simple regular expression to auto generate the
changelog as follows:



- Notepad



-  Stop mixing unicode and ANSI strings (GED) (rev 123-3/07/2009)



USER32



- (BugFix see 999), Don't dereference NULL pointers (GED) (rev123-3/07/2009)



Regards,

/Marc





From: Ged 
Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 3:30 PM
To: ros-dev(a)reactos.org 
Subject: [ros-dev] Commit log


I think we all agree that the process of filling out a changelog is a task we would rather
avoid.

Collibri has made some efforts to alleviate this and despite getting some good results
we're also seeing a lot of information which isn't changelog oriented. This now
leaves us with a new problem of having to manually go through data output from
Collibri's tool and reformat it.

This is arguably more time consuming than the original method and isn't working for us
in its current form.

 

The current problem with this method is that a commit log is not a changelog and getting
something which can be classed as a changelog from this without human intervention is an
impossible task. There are also some people who would rather write their own changelog
instead of allowing a tool to generate it for you. 

 

The problem as I see it is two fold :

 

-          Commit messages generally contain cryptic message, humour, idioms and
frustration

-          Patches can spread over a wide range of modules making it difficult to insert
them into the correct position in the changelog.

 

A possible solution to this is to wrap up a changelog in XML elements. Such a commit log
would be as follows :

 

......................................................................................................

- Stop mixing unicode and ANSI strings

- Don't dereference NULL pointers

 

<changelog>

  <notepad>Converted the application to Unicode</notepad>

  <user32>Fixed a crash highlighted via  adobe acrobat</user32>

</changelog>

......................................................................................................

 

This will allow anyone who wants to have a changelog autogenerated at release time to take
advantage and anyone who wants to do their own to ignore it.

The problem with this method lies in getting the XML tags correct.

 

Anyone have any other ideas?

 

Ged.

 

 

 



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