Bug 239125

Summary:	Eliminate changelogs
Product:	WebKit	Reporter:	Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro>
Component:	Tools / Tests	Assignee:	Jonathan Bedard <jbedard>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	Normal	CC:	angelos, jbedard, mcatanzaro, webkit-bug-importer
Priority:	P2	Keywords:	InRadar
Version:	WebKit Nightly Build
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	239082, 240759

Description Michael Catanzaro 2022-04-12 07:40:23 PDT

We have new rules for committing to git:

"""
Only repository administers have direct commit access, and this is reserved for repairing infrastructure issues. Pull requests should be landed through Merge-Queue, which is achieved by applying merge-queue or unsafe-merge-queue label to your pull request.
"""

This works usually, but it fails for commits that roll over changelogs. These cannot go through a merge queue because they will break if any other commit is part of the queue. We should either:

 (a) Figure out a strategy for rolling changelogs anyway, e.g. WebKit repo administrators to do this themselves twice per year; or
 (b) Just freeze the changelog files so we don't have to touch them anymore. They are no longer useful: git commit messages should serve this purpose from now on.

Comment 1 Michael Catanzaro 2022-04-12 07:49:00 PDT

> (a) Figure out a strategy for rolling changelogs anyway, e.g. WebKit repo administrators to do this themselves twice per year; or

Another option would be to add a label that is even more powerful than Unsafe-Merge-Queue, e.g. Skip-Merge-Queue or Roll-Changelogs. This would cause the queue to stop what it's doing and merge the PR immediately only if it is a fast-forward merge. Merge queue should never rebase anything labeled Skip-Merge-Queue/Roll-Changelogs, and should reject it if not a fast-forward merge.

I think it's probably not worth it, because I cannot think of any situation where this would be required except when rolling changelogs, and it'd be much nicer to archive and stop updating the changelogs.

Comment 2 Alexey Proskuryakov 2022-04-12 12:48:11 PDT

> They are no longer useful: git commit messages should serve this purpose from now on.

The usefulness of ChangeLogs is that we can post inline comments for them during patch review.

This is not to say that my preference is to keep them; just stating as a fact.

Comment 3 Radar WebKit Bug Importer 2022-04-19 07:41:13 PDT

<rdar://problem/91959187>

Comment 4 Alexey Proskuryakov 2022-05-17 12:35:40 PDT

Done now?

Comment 5 Michael Catanzaro 2022-05-17 12:37:32 PDT

Yeah, as of today we no longer use ChangeLogs.

Comment 6 Jonathan Bedard 2022-05-20 06:45:48 PDT

Re-opening for pull request https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/828

Comment 7 Jonathan Bedard 2022-05-20 08:29:32 PDT

Landed https://commits.webkit.org/250799@main (r294544)!