Re: What's cooking in git.git (topics)

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

On Sun, 4 Mar 2007, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

quoted

quoted

This is to output logs in the GNU ChangeLog format.

FWIW I am opposed to include that. After letting it sink in, Linus' 
remarks convinced me that this format is not as useful as our other log 
formats, and for those people who really want it, there is git2cl.

Side note: I would hate to be the person who torpedoes anything that some 
people actually find useful (my motto: "actually useful is a lot better 
than clean, but not as useful")

So in that sense, if people actually find GNU changelog format to be 
useful enough that they want a script for it, I don't think we should 
relegate it to second-class citizenship just because _we_ don't think it's 
a wonderful format.

Oh, I certainly would not disagree.

But I do not think encouraging people to script is necessarily
relegating it to second-class citizenship, as it appears there
are rooms for project and language specific heuristics to come
in for summarizing the real log into a variant of GNU changelog
that is most useful for a particular project, I think it makes
sense to implement it as a postprocessing filter to git-log -p
(even "git-log -p -U999", if somebody want to do a language
specific function labels), just like Simon did with his git2cl
to output a particular variant (i.e. the one that lacks the
function names) of GNU changelog to suit his projects' needs.

Given time, Simon's script may be improved and prove to be
flexible enough to accomodate the needs of all (or almost all)
other projects that want to use GNU changelog format.  At that
point, we might even want to include it in contrib/ of git.git,
if enough people are interested in it and if distributing with
the core helps the script gain wider exposure.

The fact that GNU changelog is then mis-designed to do per-file changelogs 
etc is more an effect of CVS misfeatures than anything else. But compared 
to all the other things CVS gets wrong, that's a very small detail ;)

That part I 100% agree ;-).