VCLog is a versatile and customizable cross-VCS/SCM changelog and release history generator.
VCLog is a multi-platform VCS logging tool. It currently supports the following Version Control Systems:
Subversion support is limited however. See Limitations noted below.
The default output is an ANSI colored GNU-like changelog. From a repository's root directory try:
The is the same as specifying 'changelog' or 'log'.
$ vclog log
To generate an a different format use -f:
$ vclog -f xml
Creating Release Histories
To get a release history specify
$ vclog -r
Again the default format is an ANSI colored GNU-like text style.
Unlike change logs, release histories group changes by tags. The tag message is used as the release note. If the underlying SCM doesn't support tag messages than the message of the first commit prior to the tag is used.
See 'vclog help' for more options.
VCLog can also be used to intelligently bump versions. To see the current tag version:
$ vclog-version 1.1.0
To see the next reasonable version based on current changes:
$ vclog-bump 1.2.0
VCLog can determine the appropriate version based on commit level. Any commit with a level greater than 1 will bump the major number, while any commit with a level of 0 or 1 will bump the minor number. All lower level only bump the patch level.
VCLog can be configured to support custom log heuristics to suite the work flow
of any project. It is recommended that configurations be placed in a project's
etc/vclog.rb file. But
config/vclog.rb and simply
Within this file rules are defined via the #on method. For example,
on /updated? (README|VERSION|MANIFEST)/ do |commit| commit.label = "Adminstrative Changes" commit.level = -3 end
To make things easier we can setup commit types. Types make it easier to categorize commits, assigning them labels and levels base on the type name. Use #type in the rules to specify the level and label of a commit type.
type :admin, -2, "Administrave Changes" on /updated? (README|VERSION|MANIFEST)/ do |commit| commit.type = :admin end
These rules can also "massage" the commit message.
on /\Aadmin:/ do |commit, matchdata| commit.type = :admin commit.message = matchdata.post_match end
Lastly, we can customize the colorization of the certain formats via #colors method.
colors :blue, :cyan, :green, :yellow, :red
The colors are taken in order from least importance to greatest importance.
Because Subversion is a centralized version control system, it contacts the server every time 'svn log' is run. For this reason, having vclog generate a release history is likely to fail since it must run 'svn log' for each tag. Any repository with more than a few tags may be denied access by the server for making too many rapid requests. I have no idea how to remedy this issue. If you have any ideas please let me know.
Copyright © 2008 Rubyworks. All rights reserved.
VCLog is modifiable and redistributable in accordance with the terms of the BSD-2-Clause license.
See License.txt for details.