[libvirt] Switch from CVS to GIT is done

[Jim Meyering]

Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 14:42 +0200, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>> Thanks to Jim Meyering we now have a new git repository, I deprecated the
>> CVS repository, it's read only, you should still be able to keep it
>> around to make patches for a few weeks if needed.
>>   The new repo is at:
>>     http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=summary
>
> Cool stuff!
>
> Any thoughts on what to do about ChangeLog?
>
> As an example of a sensible plan, GNOME dropped ChangeLog but some
> modules still generate a ChangeLog for tarball releases. See here:
>
>   http://live.gnome.org/Git/ChangeLog

+1

I stopped maintaining-in-VC the ChangeLog file for GNU coreutils, too.
However, a usable ChangeLog file still appears in each release tarball.
It's generated at "make dist" time from commit logs via this rule from
Makefile.am:

gen_start_date = 2008-02-08
.PHONY: gen-ChangeLog
gen-ChangeLog:
	if test -d .git; then						\
	  $(top_srcdir)/build-aux/gitlog-to-changelog			\
	    --since=$(gen_start_date) > $(distdir)/cl-t;		\
	  rm -f $(distdir)/ChangeLog;					\
	  mv $(distdir)/cl-t $(distdir)/ChangeLog;			\
	fi

If you want to continue using a version-controlled ChangeLog file,
you'll definitely want to start using this tool from gnulib (just build
it and install it in your path, following instructions in the C file):
http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/plain/lib/git-merge-changelog.c
It helps you avoid almost all ChangeLog-related conflicts.

The alternative (no vc'd ChangeLog file) is to generate it from commit
logs.  That's what I do in coreutils, even though conflicts are no
longer much of an issue, because I don't like having to keep ChangeLog
and commit-log in sync with duplicate info.