Re: [Bug-wget] [Bug-Wget] Policy on commit messages

[Mike Frysinger]

On 01 Nov 2014 14:05, Tim Rühsen wrote:
> Am Samstag, 1. November 2014, 05:43:11 schrieb Darshit Shah:
> > In the last few days we've seen a huge flurry of activity and a large number
> > of patches have been committed to the code base. As someone who was
> > traveling and hence unable to keep up with the mailing lists, I tried to
> > catch up by looking at the code base and the changes that have been made.
> > 
> > It would turn out that the commit messages aren't very informative on the
> > last few commits. Unless I know the context of the change from the mailing
> > list, it would be very difficult to understand why that particular change
> > was important. Both the ChangeLog and commit messages usually only describe
> > the change in literal terms but not in their logical reasoning.
> > 
> > I propose that henceforth, all commits be reviewed for detailed descriptions
> > of not only the syntactical changes, but also the logical reasons behind
> > the change. This will help us in the long term to follow through the
> > changes in the code base and also make it easier for new contributors to
> > understand why some things are the way they are.
> 
> As I understood, for GNU projects we have very detailed ChangeLog entries and 
> thus very short commit messages.

the GNU project ChangeLogs are not useful in git.  their intention is to be 
mechanical and describe what's changed so that in a CVS world, you could easily 
revert.  most GNU projects that have moved to git have also updated their 
commit 
message policy to not be useless (although they still hold onto ChangeLogs).  
some have automated the procedure though so that they put the info into the 
commit message and then the ChangeLog is generated from that.  see coreutils 
git 
messages as an example.
-mike

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