ChangeLogs and the CVS log

CVS maintains its own logs, which you can access using the `cvs log' command. This duplicates the information present in the ChangeLog, but binds each entry to a specific revision, which can be helpful at times.

However, the CVS log is no substitute for the ChangeLog files.

• CVS provides no easy way to see the changes made to a set of files in chronological order. They're sorted first by filename, not by date.
• Unless you put full ChangeLog paragraphs in your CVS log entries, it's difficult to pull together changes that cross several files.
• CVS doesn't segregate log entries for branches from those for the trunk in any useful way.

In some circumstances, though, the CVS log is more useful than the ChangeLog, so we maintain both. When you commit a change, you should provide appropriate text in both the ChangeLog and the CVS log.

It is not necessary to provide CVS log entries for ChangeLog changes, since it would simply duplicate the contents of the file itself.