The creation of the package changelog is based on a reference file.
However that reference file contained log information in a specific
timezone which requires to hardcode the region of that timezone
in the code to correctly run date/time calculations. This can
be done better from a conceptual point of view. This patch changes
the handling in a way that the reference file is a git log
excerpt including the dates as git log lists them. The dates
contains complete numeric time/date/zone information and can be
used for calculations. The changelog helper tool converts the
result data to match the requirements of rpm changelog files
and prints the time/date information localized to the callers
timezone or as UTC if the --utc switch is given. By default the
user local timezone settings applies. That way the setup of
the local timezone is immaterial to the changelog processor
and the workaround in the gitlab-ci rpm stage can be deleted
too.
Fix changelog entries for their encoding, author name and format
Also make sure commits are shown in reverse chronological order
of the author date. We intentionally don't use the commit date
because a commit can be older than the latest entry in the current
reference file and would then not be part of the git log
information
The current way of creating the changelog file for the package
is based on reading the entire history of the git repository and
turns that information into a changelog. The downside of this
approach is that any change in the code that creates this changelog
information will impact older entries and could cause a conflict
on the changes file of the released package. This usually leads
to declined package submissions and blocks us in fixing bugs
in the changelog generator. This commit changes the process in
a way that only changes related to the oldest entry of a reference
changelog file compared to the current branch are taken into
account. This Fixes#979
