2 @section VCS To ChangeLog
4 @c Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
6 @c Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
7 @c under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
8 @c any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
9 @c Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A
10 @c copy of the license is at <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html>.
12 @cindex VCS To ChangeLog
13 @findex vcs-to-changelog
15 Gnulib provides the @samp{vcs-to-changelog} module to generate an output
16 similar to the GNU ChangeLog format from metadata of source control software
17 such as git. Here's an example of using @samp{vcs-to-changelog}:
20 build-aux/vcs-to-changelog.py <from_ref> <to_ref>
23 where @code{<from_ref>} and @code{<to_ref>} refer to the range of commits to
26 VCS To ChangeLog currently recognises changes in C source code and can traverse
27 commits in git. Additional source frontends and source control backends may be
28 added to the module. @samp{vcs-to-changelog} takes the following optional
32 @item @code{-d}: Run the parser debugger, used for debugging
33 @samp{vcs-to-changelog}
34 @item @code{-q filename}: Load @var{filename} as the quirks file for the
38 The quirks file is a python module that must minimally implement a
39 @code{get_project_quirks} function that returns an object of type
40 @code{ProjectQuirks} or its subclass. The subclass may override the following
41 members of @code{ProjectQuirks}:
44 @item @code{repo}: Specify the project repo source control. The default value
47 @item @code{IGNORE_LIST}: A list of files to ignore in the changesets, either
48 because they are not needed (such as the ChangeLog) or because they are
49 not parseable. For example, the GNU C Library has a header file that is only
50 assembly code, which breaks the C parser.
52 @item @code{MACRO_QUIRKS}: A list of dictionary entries with indexes as
53 @code{orig} and @code{sub} where @code{orig} is a Python regular expression
54 pattern to match and @code{sub} is the substitution. These substitutions are
55 used to work around C/C++ macros that are known to break parsing of C programs.
57 @item @code{C_MACROS}: This is a list of C preprocessor macro definitions that
58 are extensively used and are known to break parsing due to some characteristic,
59 mainly the lack of a semicolon at the end.