Page:Sacha Chua - Emacs Chat with Carsten Dominik.djvu/14

 interesting. If you write an Emacs package will be part of Emacs, Emacs of course requires you to produce changelog entries in the right form at hand. So you have this special changelog file which you have to do. For really a number of years, we basically had to do double bookkeeping in Org Mode because we had a version…

Sacha: Yes. I heard about that recent mix, the recent shift.

Carsten: We had a versioning system, and then we are still keeping all these changelogs. Even worse, when it came towards release time, I would actually go through and look at all the changes, and then sort of more or less by hand, produce all those changelog entries. Sometimes I would only produce half and hope that the Emacs maintainer wouldn't notice.

That was really terrible. And the way we do it now is we only use Git. No changelog files. We just enforce that the description of the change in the git commit message has to be formatted in a way that it will work as a changelog entry. And then in the end, at release time, we just have a script which uses Git to extract all the things and put them into a changelog file. This is really a very simple solution but very effective.

Sacha: Yes.

Carsten: That's how we do this.

Sacha: Yes. People are just talking about that in the Emacs channel today. If you're doing that double bookkeeping, like, “Okay, changelog. Yes, there's a merge conflict. I know.”

Carsten: Exactly. That was a useful thing. That's already basically all the set up which I have in my Emacs file. I'm sure it's much more limited than what many other people have. But that doesn't keep me from using it everyday for many hours. I think my day is split half between mail and Emacs. I think these are the two things which I look at. That's it.

Sacha: What do you wish you could do with Emacs that you're currently not doing?

Carsten: What do I wish I could do with Emacs that I'm currently not doing? It's a good question. Sometimes when I use Org files to write down notes, I would like to be able to make a drawing.