Rant about ChangeLog entries and commit messages

[Andreas Schwab]

Samuel Tardieu <sam@rfc1149.net> writes:

> As a recent committer to GCC, I am always surprised to see the content
> of ChangeLog entries and commit messages.
>
> I tend to find GCC ChangeLog entries useless. For example, the more
> recent ChangeLog entry in gcc/ChangeLog is:
>
> | 2007-11-30  Jan Hubicka  <jh@suse.cz>
> | 
> |         * ggc-common.c (dump_ggc_loc_statistics): Reset ggc_force_collect
> |         flag.
>
> How could a newcomer guess why the gcc_force_collect flag needs to be
> reset?

That is supposed to be written in a comment.  The change log entry
should describe _what_ is being changed, so that you can find out when a
particular change was made.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
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