maven changelog plugin issues (was: Re: Something fishy with SVN?)

[Henning Schmiedehausen <hp...@intermeta.de>]

Hi,

[removed Apache Infra, because it no longer concerns them, but added
maven-dev]

I didn't really understand the "small library" comment. Is that a
comment about commons-email needing that information or did I get it
wrong? It is not just commons-email. I only noticed the problem on
commons-email. But I'm sure, many people imported CVS trees into
Subversion and having _less_ information in my sites after doing a
conversion is not really a good thing to have.

As I wrote some times before, I do have a number of issues with the
changelog plugin:

What I would _love_ to see (especially in the light of being able to
reproduce a site build at a given time) is the ability to define a point
in time which is used for generating the changelog. Or a tag. But a
fixed point in time. 

So I can do (example, does not work):

maven.changelog.type = date
maven.changelog.lastdate = 2005-09-29
maven.changelog.range = 30

and that would produce the changelog of 30 days up to 2005-09-29. No
matter on which date I ran the changelog generation command. Same would
be great for tags:

maven.changelog.type=tag
maven.changelog.tag=RELEASE_1_0
maven.changelog.range=30

The frustrating thing here is, that most of this is already in place but
does not work as I would expect: There is the ability to give a
changelog relative to a tag but only _after_ that tag. If you want to
build a site documenting a release, you want to have information _up to_
that tag. There is range but it is not used if type is tag.

The current changelog generation is highly volatile because it considers
the "state of now()" as a part of the information which is used to
generate the changelog. This means that potentially no two changelog
generations are the same. And one can't reproduce a changelog, because
you can't go back in time. Even though there is a change log type
"date", it does not really help you because it sets the _START_ date,
not the _END_ date of the change log.

But unless you do build a site related to a current development tree and
not to a released (i.e. fixed in time) version, setting the start date
is not really interesting. Because for a release, I want to know "how
did I get to this point in time/code". For a development tree, I want to
know "How did I get to now() when I started at <date>/<tag>?".

As a side point: For subversion, where you have unified revision numbers
and atomic commits, the ability to use a tag would be cool(because
according to the
http://maven.apache.org/reference/plugins/changelog/properties.html page
this works only for CVS anyway) but the ability to specify a revision
number (because in Subversion, tags are just 'named revisions') would be
even more useful.

On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 07:35 +1000, Brett Porter wrote:
> Someone has recently posted a workaround (patch) in Maven's JIRA. It
> gets all revisions for the repository and then only puts any in the last
> 30 days in the report. A bit too brute force for general use, but it'll
> work if you need it for a small library.

I don't think that you can do it any other way. This is a subversion
shortcoming, not a changelog plugin. If you try to use date range
checking and subversion does not deliver all the log information, you
must pull everything and pick. Unless you have a really, really long
changelog, that shouldn't really be a problem.

	Best regards
		Henning


> 
> - Brett
> 
> Henning Schmiedehausen wrote:
> 
> >Hi,
> >
> >ah, thanks, didn't know about that FAQ. Doesn't help me with my problems
> >as the change logs are maven driven, though. :-)
> >
> >	Best regards
> >		Henning
> >
> >
> >  
> >
-- 
Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen          INTERMETA GmbH
hps@intermeta.de        +49 9131 50 654 0   http://www.intermeta.de/

      RedHat Certified Engineer -- Jakarta Turbine Development
   Linux, Java, perl, Solaris -- Consulting, Training, Engineering

                     4 - 8 - 15 - 16 - 23 - 42


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Re: maven changelog plugin issues

[Brett Porter <br...@apache.org>]

Henning Schmiedehausen wrote:

>Hi,
>
>[removed Apache Infra, because it no longer concerns them, but added
>maven-dev]
>
>I didn't really understand the "small library" comment. Is that a
>comment about commons-email needing that information or did I get it
>wrong? It is not just commons-email. I only noticed the problem on
>commons-email. But I'm sure, many people imported CVS trees into
>Subversion and having _less_ information in my sites after doing a
>conversion is not really a good thing to have.
>  
>
It effects everything. I just meant the workaround is a brute force one
(svn log everything, then get the dates), so only suitable for a small
project. If it takes too long, don't use it. If it doesn't, go for it.

- Brett

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