Subject: Add-change-log

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 96 1:09:22 BST

Message written at 30 Sep 1996 14:14:10 -0400

I noticed that on DOS and WinNT the changelog file defaults to
changelo rather than ChangeLog.  I can understand this for DOS, but I
thought WinNT had long file names.  I am also having some difficulties
with this.

BTW I also notice that if I use add-change-log-entry-other-window it
does not prompt me for a file name, while if I use 
add-change-log-entry it does.  Seems inconsistent to me.

==John ff

---

From: Milt Epstein <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 08:52:34 -0500 (CDT)

Note: I don't use these functions, but I was curious so I poked around
the corresponding emacs lisp file (so my only knowledge of their
behavior and their use is from that).

> thought WinNT had long file names.  I am also having some difficulties

The code for this is in add-log.el in the emacs lisp sub-directory
(for those of you who like to look at emacs lisp code), in the
function change-log-name.  It returns "changelo" if the system-type is
either ms-dos or windows-nt.  Perhaps they do this because not all NT
systems/directories use long file names, so it's a LCD type of thing.

There is a relatively easy way around it: there is a variable
change-log-default-name which is checked first.  So if you did

(setq change-log-default-name "ChangeLog")

you should get the behavior you want.  (But you might want to check
the documentation on the function find-change-log if you're going to
do this.)

> add-change-log-entry it does.  Seems inconsistent to me.

It does seem inconsistent.  And it does seem to also be inconsistent
with the documentation on the functions -- i.e. they are documented to
behave the same, but the code is slightly different, and as you see,
the behavior is also slightly different.  But if it's any consolation,
it behaves the same on UNIX :-).  I'd think the way to resolve this is
to put in a bug report to the GNU people about it.

Here's a possible workaround: If you call
add-change-log-entry-other-window with a prefix argument (e.g. just
type C-u before you call it), it will prompt you for the file name.

Milt Epstein
Software Engineer
Central Data Corporation
[email-masked]
WWW: http://www.cd.com/
FTP: ftp.cd.com