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

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> 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.

I'm not saying users that read them don't exist, I just think they're
rare.  My guess is that ChangeLog files are consulted far less often
than NEWS, and we know how often that happens.

But if we still consider these files useful, I think we could also
create them starting from something like `git log --stat', and then
generating the rest.  We wouldn't get a perfect result, perhaps, but we
could probably get 99 % of the way there if we really wanted to.

IOW, I think the question of distributing ChangeLog files could be
considered separately from their exact format.