More consistency for Git log messages?

[Segher Boessenkool]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 12:54:53AM +0100, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> Having spent a bit more time with GCC sources (as opposed to wwwdocs) 
> recently and looking for prior art to guide me, I noticed there's a 
> lot of options to specific the ChangeLog file(s) to use.
> 
> And correspondingly a lot of inconsistency.
> 
> Right now we seem to allow for
> 
>  1. gcc/cp/ChangeLog
>  2. gcc/cp/ChangeLog:
>  3. gcc/cp
>  4. gcc/cp:
>  5. gcc/cp/
> 
> and probably more.
> 
> Can we streamline this a bit and converge on one of the forms 3-5?
> 
> Personally I'd suggest 3 (the shortest) or 5 (the directory), but whatever 
> ... as long as things become more consistent, which is easier on newbies
> and reading logs (or automatically processing them later on).

I have done 5 for many years.  The colon isn't a great choice imo, the
changelog messages themselves contain colons as well, and it is nice to
have this visually distinct.  "gcc/" looks a lot better than just "gcc"
(and similar for other dirs, but less bad).  (I often left it out
completely if it would have been just gcc/, since it was just for
humans, pretty much all of the changelog format is not machine-parseable
without AI advances anyway, so heh).

But 1 and 2 are much worse indeed :-)  Unnecessary words distract from
the actual content.


Segher