Re: ChangeLog and commit messages

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>
> Cc: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>,  hi-angel@yandex.ru,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2023 07:50:52 +0100
> 
> Hello,
> 
> On Mon 19 Jun 2023 at 07:33PM +03, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > If your problems are with the feature branch, then I think you are
> > making your life harder than it needs to be.  Our conventions for
> > formatting commit log messages don't apply to feature branches.  On
> > feature branches, the developers are free to format the log messages
> > as they see fit; the only log message that matters is the one for the
> > merge-commit which lands the feature branch on master (which you have
> > to create by hand anyway).
> >
> > The upshot of all this is that while you are working on a feature
> > branch:
> >
> >   . you can use short single-line note-like log messages, which might
> >     be unclear to anyone but yourself
> >   . you should generally commit each time when you finish some
> >     meaningful changeset, so that it could be later reverted without
> >     complications -- this goes well with short log messages
> >   . it is futile to use "C-x 4 a"-style log messages, especially for
> >     changes in files or in functions the branch adds, because in the
> >     final commit log we only need to see "foo: New file"
> 
> Is this written down somewhere?

Not that I know of, no.

> I had no idea about it.

Did you work on feature branches of the Emacs Git repository?  Very
few people did or do, so having this in the documentation for the
benefit of a very few sounds un-economical.  I won't object to having
this in some place in admin/notes if someone finds that useful, but
please note that what I wrote is by no means agreed upon by everyone:
opinions vary widely and wildly on what are the best practices of
working on branches, starting from the merge vs rebase issue (if one
uses rebase, the log messages of intermediate commits disappear
anyway).

> If I'd recently started a feature branch, I'd likely have been
> carefully formatting my commits, for no good reason.

Which is why I posted the above.  Now you know.