bug#68691: 30.0.50; [WISHLIST] Make it easier to conform to desired commit message format

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>
> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2024 15:09:22 -0800
> 
> FWIW, I'll not be working on such a mode myself, as I'd rather see that
> we promoted useful commit messages in the style of, say, the Linux
> kernel instead of the GNU ChangeLog format.  It is simply redundant to
> enumerate changed files when using a modern distributed VCS like Git.
> But that's my personal opinion, and not currently that of the project.

The reason we keep the ChangeLog format is that then the ChangeLog
files generated from the Git logs and included in the release tarballs
are useful on their own, without the need to use Git and have the
repository cloned on the end user's machine.  Admittedly, systems
where Emacs is installed but Git access to our repository is limited
or non-existent are relatively rare these days, but they do exist (I
personally have to work on such a system, FWIW).  Being able to grep
the ChangeLog files locally is an advantage in those cases.

We have in Emacs several commands that help producing the log messages
according to our conventions, so the only reasons for people not to
provide such commit logs that I think of are:

  . our conventions are unknown to the contributor
  . the contributor is not familiar with Emacs commands that help with
    producing well-formatted commit log messages
  . the contributor doesn't use Emacs to edit the code