[Junit-devel] Ongoing usefulness of acknowledgements.txt and bug fixes in release notes?

[David S. <da...@sa...>]

All,

To date, we've kept two pieces of documentary metadata along with
JUnit: acknowledgements.txt and ReleaseNotes files.  In order:

1) acknowledgements.txt is an attempt at a log of everyone outside of
the primary maintainers who has contributed in some way to JUnit.  It
was, I believe, originally intended to serve two purposes: (a) for
traceability, should any legal questions arise about the provenance of
a piece of code, (b) before github, we often ended up massaging (or
replacing) patches ourselves before committing them to CVS, and we
wanted a way to genuinely thank and remember the original authors.

GitHub now helps with both of these issues: since we can discuss pull
requests before they're accepted, we can ask contributors to fix minor
issues, and github keeps excellent track of what came from where.  In
addition, distributed maintenance of the acknowledgements.txt file has
become a pain, since as a linear document, there is often a race
condition between appended items.

2) I've been asking committers to include updates to ReleaseNotes
files as part of check-ins.  This has some of the same issues as
above: it's no longer strictly necessary given GitHub support, and
also leads to race conditions.

So, my proposal is:

1) Drop further appends to acknowedgements.txt
2) Adopt a more formal approach to git commit messages, following
along http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html,
along release notes to be largely auto-generated at release time.

Thoughts?