Re: File names in ChangeLog entries

[Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>]

On 02 Dec 2021, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Juri Linkov <juri@linkov.net>
>> Cc: Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>,  Eli Zaretskii 
>> <eliz@gnu.org>,
>>   emacs-devel@gnu.org,  Stefan Monnier 
>>   <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>,
>>   Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org>
>> Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2021 11:12:05 +0200
>> 
>> > *  [master~1208] Save position in mark ring before jumping to 
>> > definition
>> 
>> This is a good example of an unhelpful commit message.
>> There is no way to guess it's about lisp/help-mode.el.
>
>You don't need to guess, you need to look at the rest of the log
>message.  We cannot realistically require that everything about 
>the
>change will be clear from the summary.  Mentioning file names is, 
>IME,
>mostly a waste there, because the file name provides very little
>information about the change itself, and takes quite a lot of 
>space,
>so doesn't allow to say enough about the change.

Agreed.

The point of the summary line is to encapsulate some recognizable 
core thing about the change.  When you're reading over, say, a 
long vertical list of such summaries, you can quickly recognize 
ones you already had some awareness of (and this makes branch 
comparison much easier).

We'll never be able to fit *everything* in a summary line, and 
there's no need to.  If one needs further information about that 
particular change, one can go look at the full message.

Best regards,
-Karl