Re: Rant about ChangeLog entries and commit messages

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Diego" == Diego Novillo <dnovillo@google.com> writes:

Diego> I'm not sure people will want to drop ChangeLogs anytime soon.  I
Diego> don't find them all that useful, but I *have* used them extensively
Diego> when doing archeology.  It gives you the initial thread to pull when
Diego> finding out about changes.

Yeah.  They aren't incredibly useful, but they aren't useless, either.

One thing they give you that 'svn annotate' does not is a record of
when things were deleted.  I use them this way on occasion.

I have a few concerns about a change in this area.

First, continuing to have good quality messages.  Right now at the
very least you get a (semi-) accurate record of what was touched.
I've seen plenty of ChangeLog-less projects out there than end up with
commits like "fixed a bug", or even worse.

I suppose we'll need to review the commit messages just like we review
ChangeLog entries now.  That doesn't sound fun, but I suppose it won't
be too much work.

Second, whether it makes the process heavier:

Diego> The only annoying issue with this proposal is that it forces the
Diego> committer to fish out the message URL from the mailing lists, so
Diego> perhaps we could make the check a warning instead of an error.

This would be a big pain.  Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if the mail
server added a URL to the header somewhere, so I could wait for the
mail to come back and then look it up.  The obvious alternative of
hitting reload on the gcc web page is unattractive.

Also it seems to me that this will make it a bit harder for developers
without write access to get their patches checked in ... because it
will mean even more work for whoever does the commit.

Tom