magit, changelogs and commit formatting

[Eric Abrahamsen]

I know we're supposed to move to automatically-generated changelogs Real
Soon Now, but in the meantime...

I'm having a bit of confusion about the best way to format git patches
for Emacs packages. I've pushed a few almost-but-not-quite patches that
other people have had to fix afterwards (I'm talking about commit
message formatting), and that's embarrassing. What I've done in the past
is start the commit from Magit, then hit "C" in the patch buffer, which
inserts a fairly intelligent log template into the commit message
buffer, and then I work with that.

But of course the ChangeLog is supposed to be part of the commit, which
means these messages have to be created before I even get to the commit
buffer, which so far has meant a lot of manually adding function names
and parentheses and making sure there are two spaces between the date
and my name/address.

Is there a different magic function I'm missing? Can some greybeard
quickly share a workflow? How does everyone else do this?

Any hints appreciated,

Eric