On 05/05/2010 02:05 PM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Dear Peter Tyser,
In message1273075406.2451.4225.camel@localhost.localdomain you wrote:
Could you describe what you use CHANGELOG for? I often look at logs, but 99% of the time its a log of a specific file or directory to trace a bug, see why feature X was added, etc. I rarely look at the repositories entire log, and if I do, I use 'git log'. Although 'git log' takes longer, its guaranteed to be accurate, unlike CHANGELOG which may be slightly out of date.
Most frequently I use it in combination with some form of grep command (grep, agrep etc.); sometimes I use it in vi/view for manual searching / reading.
Here are a few reasons where I prefer accessing the CHANGELOG over running "git log --grep":
it's faster:
-> time grep foobar CHANGELOG
real 0m0.005s user 0m0.004s sys 0m0.001s
-> time git log --grep=foobar>/dev/null
real 0m0.240s user 0m0.219s sys 0m0.021s
Surely the extra quarter second is not too significant compared to the time it takes to formulate the query and examine the results.
it's more efficient:
-> strace -f grep foobar CHANGELOG 2>&1>/dev/null | wc -l 143 -> strace -f git log --grep=foobar 2>&1>/dev/null | wc -l 2494
It also requires that a cache be maintained just for this purpose.
it delivers only the lines I cactually search for, while "git log --grep" always spills out the whole commit message:
-> grep MPC512x CHANGELOG | wc -l 24 -> git log --grep=MPC512x | wc -l 272
$ git log | grep MPC512x | wc -l 24
Likewise for grep options and alternate tools.
Or if you really want, you could do this locally, and put CHANGELOG in .gitignore:
$ time git log > CHANGELOG
real 0m0.453s user 0m0.350s sys 0m0.050s
You could even have a cron job keep it up to date. :-)
-Scott