The GNU standard is good and all, but I've found that it's horribly out of date.
- The name "NEWS" is not what users expect. I used to have a NEWS file which documents major changes in a high-level way, per the GNU standards. But I kept getting requests from users to "keep a changelog", and I kept getting questions from users about where the changelog is. Apparently most users never bother to check the NEWS file; they don't even associate the filename "NEWS" with what they're looking for. 95% of the users associate that concept with the word "changelog". "Changelog" is the new "NEWS". After several years, I gave up the resistance and renamed by "NEWS" to "Changelog".
- The actual Changelog format, per the GNU standards, is useless in my opinion now that version control systems have gotten so good. In my opinion, the git history is exactly what the GNU changelog tried to be, with the added benefit that the git history is much easier to browse, query and manipulate.
This, I suspect, depends on your user base. Apparently your users expect the name "changelog". (Do they all use that exact term? Could this usage be traced to a single source, common among your users?)
> The actual Changelog format, per the GNU standards, is useless in my opinion now that version control systems have gotten so good.
Indeed, I believe even GNU Emacs has abandoned (or is about to abandon) it, now that they have switched to git.
Yes my users all use the term "changelog". And outside of traditional GNU projects, I've never seen anybody talk about "the NEWS file". All I've seen is people mentioning "the changelog", by which they mean that which the GNU NEWS file is meant for.
You can write the commit messages in ChangeLog format. The format is independent of how you store it! You can then create ChangeLog files from the history for source tarballs. In fact many GNU projects seem to do that now.
Other projects (GNU Emacs) still continue to use ChangeLog files because it is easier to correct ChangeLog entries than editing the commit history (which in git is destructive).
- The name "NEWS" is not what users expect. I used to have a NEWS file which documents major changes in a high-level way, per the GNU standards. But I kept getting requests from users to "keep a changelog", and I kept getting questions from users about where the changelog is. Apparently most users never bother to check the NEWS file; they don't even associate the filename "NEWS" with what they're looking for. 95% of the users associate that concept with the word "changelog". "Changelog" is the new "NEWS". After several years, I gave up the resistance and renamed by "NEWS" to "Changelog".
- The actual Changelog format, per the GNU standards, is useless in my opinion now that version control systems have gotten so good. In my opinion, the git history is exactly what the GNU changelog tried to be, with the added benefit that the git history is much easier to browse, query and manipulate.