What is the difference between ChangeLog and NEWS?

[Peter Johansson]

ChangeLog? is much more verbose.

No point for me to explain in moire detail, so I rather give an example. Either see /home/kafka/peter/projects/osd/make-3.81 or see below.

The head of ChangeLog? in GNU Make-3.81

2006-04-01  Paul D. Smith  <psmith@gnu.org>

        Version 3.81 released.

        * NEWS: Updated for 3.81.

        * README.cvs: Mention that vpath builds are not supported out of
        CVS.  Fixes Savannah bug #16236.
        Remove update of make.texi from the list of things to do; we use
        version.texi now.

2006-03-26  Paul D. Smith  <psmith@gnu.org>

        * doc/make.texi: Clean up licensing.  Use @copying and version.texi
        support from automake, as described in the Texinfo manual.

2006-03-25  Eli Zaretskii  <eliz@gnu.org>

        * implicit.c (pattern_search) [HAVE_DOS_PATHS]: Don't compare b
        with lastslash, since the latter points to filename, not to
        target.
        * job.c (construct_command_argv_internal) [HAVE_DOS_PATHS]:
        Declare and define sh_chars_sh[].

and the NEWS file in same release:

GNU make NEWS                                               -*-indented-text-*-
  History of user-visible changes.
  1 April 2006

See the end of this file for copyrights and conditions.

All changes mentioned here are more fully described in the GNU make
manual, which is contained in this distribution as the file doc/make.texi.
See the README file and the GNU make manual for instructions for
reporting bugs.
^L
Version 3.81

* GNU make is ported to OS/2.

* GNU make is ported to MinGW.  The MinGW build is only supported by
  the build_w32.bat batch file; see the file README.W32 for more
  details.

* WARNING: Future backward-incompatibility!
  Up to and including this release, the '$?' variable does not contain
  any prerequisite that does not exist, even though that prerequisite
  might have caused the target to rebuild.  Starting with the _next_

This is of course GNU style and every project has its own style. In my opinion, ChangeLog? files are a bit obsolete since the interested can track down changes through the Trac.

[Jari Häkkinen]

(In [390]) Fixes #221.