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Showing posts from January, 2013

A bazaar hook to reduce VCS meta-data asynchrony

What changed? Sometimes, when using VCS systems such as bazaar, there is a tendency to forget to perform the necessary 'book-keeping' for those not using it because you get so focused on the tooling itself. Most VCS systems expect the author to provide a brief explanatory message per commit. This log is invaluable since it (hopefully!) provides insightful context into the programmers intentions. However, that meta-data is only available to those with a copy of the branch/checkout/stream/view or whatever your VCS calls it. But what about those who only come into contact with the project via release tarballs for example? I'm thinking specifically of changelogs. Debian and Ubuntu provide the incredibly useful ' dch ' (aka debchange ) tool which synchronises the VCS commit message with the latest ' debian/changelog ' file entry. But what if you're not working on a Debian project? When you're working on a fast-paced project, or just working at a