Ged wrote:
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.
XML is not too friendly for manually writing.
What about:
......................................................................................................
- Stop mixing unicode and ANSI strings
- Don’t dereference NULL pointers
Changelog:
Notepad: Converted the application to Unicode
User32: Fixed a crash highlighted via adobe acrobat</user32>
......................................................................................................