Re: Header lines of commit messages

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Romain Francoise <romain@orebokech.com>
> Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:33:56 +0200
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > The header line that summarizes the commit conveys useless
> > information.  It should state the essence of the change instead, so
> > that people who use "bzr log --line" will be able to grasp the purpose
> > of the change without looking at the full text.
> 
> For changes that are made directly in Emacs, yes.
> 
> In this case, org-mode is maintained outside Emacs and I'm just
> merging a fix from the original repository.

I don't see why this is different.

> If we followed the logic that the header line should always
> accurately describe the change, we wouldn't allow commits like these
> either:
> 
> 100593: Romain Francoise 2010-06-12 Synch with Gnus trunk.
> 100575: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-06-10 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
> 100541: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-06-07 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
> 100498: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-06-02 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.

For merges that bring in a lot of unrelated changes, this is
acceptable, because there's no practical way to come up with a
meaningful header line.  But in your case, you cherry-picked a single
change set that can be summarized with a short header line.

> the fact that it's a single commit rather than a bunch of
> unrelated changes doesn't really change anything.

I think it does: describing this single commit with a short meaningful
text is possible and reasonably easy.

> In an ideal world Emacs would be using Git, and org-mode, Gnus, ERC
> and others would just be submodules pointing to a given branch of
> the original repository. Then doing such a merge would not lose
> information. But we're stuck with bzr + patch.

No, in an ideal world, org-mode, Gnus, ERC, etc. would be using
Bazaar, and Bazaar would be fast enough for them to have no reason to
use Git.

In any case, I don't see a reason to punish Emacs for using Bazaar.
(Your text sounds like saying: you decided to use Bazaar, so now you
get to pay for it.)

But that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.  I'm sorry that you
disagree with me, because it means more meaningless commit messages
are to come.