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ChangeLog in git and release tarballs

I'd like to collect some opinions on whether we should continue shipping ChangeLogs in git and/or tarballs.

Current situation:

  • ChangeLog in git, gets updated at release time based on git log, shipped in tarballs
  • various docs/random/old/ChangeLog* in git, which were never shipped in tarballs

Options going forward:

  1. keep everything as is: ChangeLogs in git, ship in tarball
  2. remove ChangeLogs from git, but still ship it in the tarball
  3. remove ChangeLogs from git and tarballs

My opinion is that this made sense to do back when we were using CVS, because you'd lose all that information if the repository server went away, but doesn't make sense any longer since with git everyone has the full history as part of their checkout.

So as I see it there's not really much point in storing any ChangeLogs in git, and I don't see a particularly strong reason to ship them as part of tarballs either, or if so perhaps only a shortlog since the last release not one going back all the way to 1.0.0.

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