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Changelogs have an interesting relation to version control systems.
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They are, for some projects, the primary way of examining history.
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They provide a pattern and standard for writing commit history, which
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may encourage people to enter more details (function names, etc) in a
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systematic way than they otherwise might. The ChangeLog is available
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offline, in tarfiles, or even when the project has been switched into
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GNU ChangeLog format is only the most important, not the only such
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file. Debian uses a different format for packages. At a higher
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At the same time the information there is some redundancy: both the
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ChangeLog and the VCS want to hold the description of what has been
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done, including descriptive text, names of files changed, etc.
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Some people say__ that ChangeLogs are mostly needed because of the
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limitations of CVS (and originally RCS): if it was easy to read the VC
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history when disconnected and at local speed, and if there are atomic
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commits then they might be needed rather less.
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__ http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-06/msg00270.html
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There should be hooks called to create the log message template and
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before committing it. These might, for example, populate it with
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space for per-file comments, or check that it is in the right format.
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doc/changelogs.txt
