VCLog

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VCLog is a versatile and customizable cross-VCS/SCM changelog and release history generator.

Supported Systems

VCLog is a multi-platform VCS logging tool. It currently supports the following Version Control Systems:

• Git
• Mercurial
• Subversion

Subversion support is limited however. See Limitations noted below.

Instructions

Creating Changelogs

The default output is an ANSI colored GNU-like changelog. From a repository's root directory try:

$ vclog

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 -r, --release or --history option.

$ 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.

Bumping Versions

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.

Writing Heuristics

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 .vclog or vclog.rb also work.

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.

Limitations

Subversion

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.

Copyrights

VCLog (http://rubyworks.github.com/vclog)

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.