Re: ChangeLog dependency for `make dist`

[Paul Eggert <eggert at cs dot ucla dot edu>]

On 1/6/20 8:42 PM, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
> While attempting to generate tarballs for translations I noticed that
> `make dist` depends on ChangeLog to be present and fails since we don't
> have ChangeLog in the tree anymore.  To fix this, how about this
> workflow tweak:
>
> * Generate ChangeLog right after the freeze to allow tarball generation
> for translations
> * Update ChangeLog just before release
> * Move ChangeLog to ChangeLog.old/ right after release

This would make it harder for ordinary hackers to build a tarball, since 
ChangeLog wouldn't exist in their trees. Also, if I understand the 
Makefile correctly it would want to run a "git diff ChangeLog" which 
won't work since there's no ChangeLog committed (and there shouldn't be 
one).

Instead, how about not putting a ./ChangeLog file into the release? That 
is, we simply call the newly-generated file 
./ChangeLog.old/ChangeLog.20, and distribute it that way. In the release 
after that we call it ./ChangeLog.old/ChangeLog.21, and so on. That will 
make it easier to compare the ChangeLog files extracted from a tarball 
to the ChangeLog files checked out from Git.