Re: discussion references

[Kamil Dudka]

On Monday, March 19, 2018 8:59:53 PM CET Bruno Haible wrote:
> Kamil Dudka wrote:
> > > For gnulib, you sometimes need to look up in the mailing list archive to
> > > get the complete discussion.
> > 
> > Ideally yes.  But the commit contains no reference to that discussion and
> > the discussion contains no reference to that commit.  Are you expecting
> > people to look it up by date and/or by names of the people who suggested
> > it?
> I usually do the lookup by date. The date of the discussion is usually the
> date of the commit (minus up to 3 days).
> 
> I'm not a fan of putting discussion references into git commits, because
> they may change each time the infrastructure changes. For example,
> references to gmane threads became useless last year, and references to
> sourceforge mailing list posts also were invalidated at some point in the
> past.
> 
> Bruno

For me it would be invaluably useful if the commit message told me _why_ the 
change was made (with or without reference).  It was pushed to fix something, 
wasn't it?

The fact that you are adding a rule for getdate.c of modules/getdate to 
Makefile.am and augmenting MOSTLYCLEANFILES is already obvious from the 
corresponding diff.  Duplicating the info in the commit message is, in my 
opinion, less useful than referencing discussion with a temporarily valid
URL.

Kamil