Well, I personally think ChangeLog files are a total waste of time. You're
much better off autogenerating those from the real logs, I think.
[ Although in all honesty, I also think we could improve on our reporting
tools, and have ways to perhaps highlight big or important changes some
way ]
But a NEWS file that actually talks about new features is a different
thing. It can make lots of sense to maintain something like that, so I
wouldn't suggest canning it if it works for you. I'm not convinced it
would work for the kernel, but I suspect it can work really well for other
projects.
Well, the real problem with a clean automatic merge is not that it can't
be undone (or better yet - fixed: just edit the NEWS file and then do a
"git commit --amend NEWS" to fix up the atomatic merge), but the fact that
most of the time you'll simply never even notice.
IOW, when something merges cleanly (and the 'union' merge will basically
always do so), the most common case is probably that people won't even
_look_ at the end result - especially if it works fine most of the time.
That's why a trivial conflict can often be better than a silently clean
merge: at least it forces people to spend a small amount of brainpower to
look at the obvious fix.
But hey, give it a try. Maybe you'll like the union merge, together with
occasional manual fixups. Or maybe you'll decide that a specialized merge
strategy isn't that painful after all (or can find somebody who already
went through the pain and wrote one you can use).
Linus
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