Rant about ChangeLog entries and commit messages

[Diego Novillo]

On 12/02/07 05:05, Samuel Tardieu wrote:

> Maybe we should consider dropping ChangeLogs and using better checkin
> messages.

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

What I *do* miss a lot is a an easier way to link from the ChangeLog 
entry into the email message explaining the whys and hows of a change. 
In this respect, the comment in the code is not enough.  The comment 
explains what the code does today, it does not (and should not) explain 
the history of that piece of code.  Otherwise, comments would soon grow 
to useless proportions.

The history is something one finds on the mailing lists.  So, my 
proposal is to add a commit-time check that makes sure that the commit 
message contains a URL to the message describing the change.  IIUC, such 
check shouldn't be hard to implement (Dan?)

I try to do that with fixed PRs.  When closing one, I usually add a link 
to the message explaining the fix.

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

Thoughts?


Diego.