I have notice a trend for developers to comment their changes less with the justification that the purpose/date/reason is in the changelog. They have some very justifiable claims that duplication of effort is occuring if we require both. I am spending some serious amount of time tracking down changes. No specific direction has been given and the lack of a consistant approach has me a little peeved. Typically are people doing both? Are there tools I might want to try out to reduce the hunt down time. Currenltly we have cvs, git, and svn implementations.
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Comments in the code should describe the what the code currently does. These comments will change only if the intended behaviour of the code changes — if the revision is just a bug fix, they should not change.
Comments in the change log should describe what changes were made in this revision.
Corollary: Avoid putting revision numbers/dates and the name(s) of the programmer who made the changes in the code comments. (Thanks to both Jonathans.)