Re: Rearranging old ChangeLog files

[Jeff Law <law at redhat dot com>]

On 06/06/13 13:36, Ryan S. Arnold wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Joseph S. Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> > Among the files with trailing whitespace I didn't deal with in my general
> > cleanup are ChangeLog.{1,2,3,4,9}.
> >
> > (a) Does it seem appropriate to clean up trailing whitespace in these
> > files?
>
> I don't think it'd be inappropriate by any means, if someone wanted to do it.
>
> > (b) Various other GNU projects now arrange past ChangeLogs by year rather
> > than with numbers 1, ..., 17.  Would it seem appropriate to rearrange
> > glibc's ChangeLogs like that (ChangeLog-1991, ..., ChangeLog-2012, with
> > the main ChangeLog having the entries starting at the start of 2013 and
> > being rotated annually)?
>
> Does rearranging by year do anything for us?  Perhaps rearranging by
> release would be more useful than by year.
The by-year arrangement used by GCC makes it easy to see when certain 
hunks of code were added/changed with a simple grep because the filename 
will be part of the grep output.  ie

For example:

[law@stumpy gcc]$ grep types_compatible_p Ch*
ChangeLog:      require types_compatible_p types.
ChangeLog-2001: Add __builtin_types_compatible_p.
ChangeLog-2001: (__builtin_types_compatible_p): Likewise.
ChangeLog-2003: (function_types_compatible_p): Add extra parameter, 
change all callers.
ChangeLog-2003: * c-typeck.c (function_types_compatible_p): Ignore 
incompatible
ChangeLog-2004: * gimplify.c (gimplify_modify_expr_rhs): Use 
types_compatible_p.
ChangeLog-2004: (c_types_compatible_p): Move function definition...

So the function was added in 2001 and I can quickly scan what years it 
changed without looking at the log entries themselves to get a date.

I can then search for things like

types_compatible_p 2008 in google and get useful stuff (ie, threaded 
discussions about the change).

jeff