[gentoo-dev] Re: [Council] ChangeLog generation within Gentoo

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Fabian Groffen posted on Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:00:22 +0200 as excerpted:

> On 26-10-2011 14:02:12 -0400, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> Well, if the desire to trim changelogs is generally agreed upon we
>> could always just count the lines and post a top-100 list or something
>> and let package maintainers go in and truncate things as seems bet to
>> them, with the guideline to keep the file intact up to a year before
>> the last commit.  Eventually the files will be cleaned up.
> 
> Don't you think it's much more sensical to remove all entries for
> ebuilds that are no longer in the tree then?

1) Given the irregularity of older entries, that could be difficult to 
automate, tho it could be done going forward, once a log has been 
manually trimmed once.

2) I'd argue for keeping upstream version commits and removals, so at 
minimum, the dates they were in the tree can be tracked.  (FWIW, I often 
find myself checking this information when helping someone try to build 
something half-modern on a stale distro like CentOS 5, for instance.)  It 
could be argued that this is a reasonably important minimal historical 
record.

But all stabilizations, -rX bumps, and changes other than upstream 
version addition and removal, indeed, removing those entries say three 
months minimum after the ebuilds are no longer in the tree does make 
sense.  (And as a bonus, such removal would make the historical record 
above, addition and removal of older upstream versions, far easier to 
read, since it'd be all that's left for versions already out-of-tree. =:^)

-- 
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