Re: PROPOSAL: Move to git, now that bzr is no longer a req.

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>     The question is whether we should edit them separately
>     from the commit messages, or if we should produce them
>     by (programmatically) extracting them from the commit
>     messages.
>
> I think it is best for commit messages to be brief high-level 
> summaries of the changes, and put the details only in ChangeLog.
> I think that these two forms of desription complement each other
> and that it is useful to have both available.

Git treats the first line of a commit message specifically as a summary.
When formatting a commit for mailing, this line is used as the subject
of the mail while the rest of the commit message appears in the mail
body.

This inherent subdivision of commit messages maps well enough to the GNU
subdivision of complementing summary/detail that it becomes mostly
pointless in practice to maintain a separate file for storing this
information.

-- 
David Kastrup