Re: Patch to git_changelog for release note creation

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 9:59 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
>> I would like to apply the attached patch to git_changelog for use in
>> creating the major release notes.  I specifically added these flags:
>
>>     --author-after  Show author after the commit
>>     --master-only   Show commits made exclusively to the master branch
>>     --reverse-order Show commits in reverse date order
>
> Your implementation of --master-only seems really grotty.  Can't you
> just add "origin/master" to the basic git log command?

No, he wants to exclude things that were back-patched.  But I agree
it's kind of grotty.  Imagine you are preparing release notes for a
minor release.  Now you will want all the back-branch commits, but not
the ones that were only committed to master.  I think rather than
inserting piecemeal hacks like this, we should try to be a bit more
generic, something like -x branchname to exclude any commit that
touches the named branch, and -o branchname to restrict the output to
commits that touch ONLY the named branch, or something along those
lines.

> As for --reverse-order, what's that got to do with preparing release
> notes?  The end product shouldn't be particularly sensitive to the order
> of commit of features ...

True...

And I can't say I like --author-only much, either.  I understand its
use for preparing release notes, but I don't really like the idea of
adding something to the tool that solves 1% of the problem of
automating release note generation.  I'm afraid that in a few major
releases the documented method of preparing release notes will look
like this:

src/tools/git_changelong --master-only --author-after --reverse-order
--omit-commit-ids --omit-dates --another-switch-bruce-invented
--more-magic --additional-sorcery --fix-other-things
--some-more-tweaks --etc-etc-etc

At which point we will have successfully automated roughly 8% of the
work of release note generation and reduced the source code to utter
unmaintainability.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company