[Tcllib-devel] ChangeLog usage in Tcllib

[Andreas K. <and...@ac...>]

With Tcllib having moved to a Fossil repository the existing ChangeLog
files have effectively become obsolete, as Fossil's timeline is
better, assuming that good commit messages are made.

With Tcllib 1.16 out of the door I would like to officially deprecate
the use of the ChangeLogs.
While we should keep them for historical reasons (IMHO), there is no
need to update them anymore.
That was always a bit of a pain, to provide a commit message, and
update the ChangeLog with that is essentially the same.

>From now on we should simply provide good commit messages and let the
timeline take care of the rest.

In the past letting go of the ChangeLog was a bit difficult because
the SAK tool was scraping them to determine the list of changes since
the least release, for the generated README file. This is not an issue
anymore as I rewrote that part of SAK during the 1.6 RC period to pull
the necessary information directly from the fossil repository (*)
instead of the ChangeLog files.

Regarding good commit messages, some guidelines

- Mention the added/removed/modified package.
  This is especially important for the big multi-package modules, i.e.
math, struct, pt, and others.

- If a ticket is involved, mention it by UUID (10 digits are usually
enough for uniqueness).

- There is _no_ need to mention the modified files, as this
information is available through the timeline links to the revision
details.

======
(Ad *) Mainly the 'event' table, the internal form of the timeline.

-- 
Andreas Kupries
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