Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/02/2018 11:21 PM, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> You overexagerate the amount of time it takes, it definitly does not
> double it, it takes only a few seconds for a small change, and tops
> half a minute for a large one like the one you provided as an example.

I don't think Joseph is exaggerating. I too have experienced situations 
where the ChangeLog entry took longer to write than the useful work. It 
certainly takes longer than "half a minute" for me to write a ChangeLog 
entry for one of my typical patches.

This is an issue even for short and trivial patches. For example, for 
this one:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=f8b4e87d5d4f57954b50677add76ce5136211dc1

I guess that it took me a couple of minutes to write and test the patch, 
and about the same time to write the ChangeLog entry. Although I could 
type faster when editing the ChangeLog entry than when coding, I had to 
type a lot more stuff, and Emacs's assistance for editing ChangeLog 
files did not help me much.

For longer patches, I often do not follow the ChangeLog guidelines, and 
nobody cares because it would be a waste of my time and theirs to do so. 
Here's an example:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=63b04c11d530f4a6a41f112d1b3ba1ed1eb81195