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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > I think it is best for commit messages to be brief high-level 
 > summaries of the changes, and put the details only in ChangeLog.

This violates the "don't repeat yourself" principle to some extent,
and conflicts with habits formed in other projects.  Some projects
don't have ChangeLogs (or don't bother about commit messages, but
that's very rare), so the preferred format gets all data, usually with
some convention about a single line that *identifies* the commit, but
may not be a full "executive summary".  (For those who know Darcs,
think "patch name".)

I also get the feeling that a lot of committers feel that they receive
ambiguous, even conflicting, advice about commit message and ChangeLog
entries (eg, "follow the GNU Coding Standard" vs. "here's how you
should do it" if Florian's characterization is correct).

 > I think that these two forms of desription complement each other
 > and that it is useful to have both available.

There's absolutely no reason why both can't be in a single "place".
The implementation in commit messages could be done via a VCS feature
like "git notes" (resp, a special log formatter -- Jordi says
Mercurial has a whole template language that can be used in logs), so
you don't see the detail unless you ask for notes (resp, the verbose
form).  It could be done via a log-viewer Emacs mode.

But as Eric says, this is not the thread to discuss that, because it
changes workflow.