[Bioc-devel] Changelog

James MacDonald jmacdon at med.umich.edu
Tue Nov 6 15:22:38 CET 2007


Hi all,

As we all discussed last month, rather than parsing the svn commit logs by hand and sending an email (as well as posting to the BioC website), I am now automagically parsing the svn commit logs and putting the results online using the blosxom blogging software (yes, I too have entered the 21th century ;-D).

http://fgc.lsi.umich.edu/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi

There were many opinions expressed about the changelog and the rules governing what goes in and what stays out, and I appreciate all the input. I understand that some developers use the commit messages as a means to communicate to their fellow developers, and that some commits are really just small changes that might not need to be tracked. 

That said, I think we are all going to have to work together on this one. It is much easier for me to look at a commit message when parsing by hand and say 'Hmm. That doesn't make any sense to me.' and summarily exclude it from the changelog. When doing things automatically this isn't that easy.

So if you are making a commit that doesn't need to be published on the changelog, simply prepend a # to the beginning of all lines that you don't want published. As mentioned before, lines != sentence. A line is a block of text separated by a new line character, so a single # will comment out everything you type until you hit the return key.

The changelog allows one to look at changes for just one package, by date, etc. See here for more information

http://fgc.lsi.umich.edu/info.html 

There is also the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed for the whole changelog or just a subset of packages, although the results vary depending on the RSS reader you use. Firefox's live bookmarks doesn't seem to work correctly, whereas the google reader does YMMV.

Best,

Jim


-- 

James W. MacDonald, M.S.
Biostatistician
Affymetrix and cDNA Microarray Core
University of Michigan Cancer Center
1500 E. Medical Center Drive
7410 CCGC
Ann Arbor MI 48109
734-647-5623

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