[PATCH 2/2] patman: Add option to disable combined changelogs

[Simon Glass]

Hi Sean,

On Thu, 19 Mar 2020 at 23:37, Sean Anderson <seanga2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> By default patman generates a combined changelog for the cover letter. This
> may not always be desireable.
>
> Many patches may have the same changes. These can be coalesced with
> "Series-process-log: uniq", but this is imperfect. First, this cannot be
> used when there are multi-line changes. In addition, similar changes like

We could perhaps support this if we used indentation to indicate multiple lines

- line 1 of a multi-line message
  line 2 here
- this is line 1 of a single-line message

> "Move foo to patch 7" will not be merged with the similar "Move foo to this
> patch from patch 6".
>
> Changes may not make sens outside of the patch they are written for. For

sense

> example, a change line of "Add check for bar" does not make sense outside
> of the context in which bar might be checked for. Some changes like "New"
> or "Lint" may be repeated many times throughout different change logs, but
> carry no useful information in a summary.
>
> Lastly, I like to summarize the broad strokes of the changes I have made in
> the cover letter, while documenting all the details in the appropriate
> patches. I think this make it easier to get a good feel for what has
> changed, without making it difficult to wade through every change in the
> whole series.
>
> For these reasons, this patch adds an option to disable the automatic
> changelog.
>
> Signed-off-by: Sean Anderson <seanga2 at gmail.com>
> ---
>
>  tools/patman/func_test.py   | 2 +-
>  tools/patman/patchstream.py | 7 ++++---
>  tools/patman/patman.py      | 6 +++++-
>  3 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

Thanks for the great explanations on your patches.

In the case where there is no automatic change log on the cover
letter, do you use 'Series-notes' instead? I'd like to enforce some
sort of change log in the cover letter.

I also think this would be better as a tag in a commit, like
'Series-no-change-log: yes'. That way you set it up when you create
the patches, and it persists without needing to add the options each
time.

Regards,
Simon