Re: Basic Bazaar guide for Emacs hackers.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 >     What you are recommending is very easy for the individual developer
 >     but makes for a messy history.
 > 
 > Could you explain what you mean by messy?  Objectively, which are the
 > characteristics you consider messy?  Knowing that, I could determine
 > whether I agree with you.

(1) VCS commit messages which are committed at the end of a protracted
    review tend to be less detailed and sometimes inaccurate,
    sometimes because they are not revised to reflect review,
    sometimes because the details are poorly remembered.  Conversely,
    the kinds of effort needed to keep accurate information in logs
    are somewhat reduced by a practice of frequent commits.  (In the
    workflow recommended by BzrForEmacsDevs, you get to have your cake
    and eat it too: "bzr log" by default shows the details of all the
    commits when used in the working branch, but only the summary log
    for the merge commit when used in mirrors of the trunk.)

(2) Medium-sized repetitive tasks (such as updating a bunch of
    function calls from an obsolete API to the recommended one) tend
    to occur in several commits, interspersed with commits from other
    tasks.

(3) Anything that can be considered a single task tends to get
    committed, even though a more global view would group it with
    other tasks.

(4) People tend to commit everything in their workspace, including
    unrelated typo fixes and small bugfixes.  Sometimes the additional
    changes aren't logged.  This is an easy mistake to make
    occasionally, even if you normally take care about it.

All of these can be ameliorated with discipline in a CVS-style
workflow; for most people it seems to require substantially less
effort to use feature branches to organize their work.