Re: Header lines of commit messages

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Romain Francoise writes:
 > Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
 > 
 > > The header line that summarizes the commit conveys useless
 > > information.

I would phrase that "the headline conveys the information that
thinking about this commit is useless to Emacs maintainers."<wink>
Seriously, you've been describing your information overload in other
contexts.  Yes, as a member of the project, it's important to have
some idea of who's active, but the details would just be overload.

 > In this case, org-mode is maintained outside Emacs and I'm just
 > merging a fix from the original repository.

I suggest that you use the word "synch" for this purpose, as Gnus
does.  I think the presence of the commit is a convenience, myself,
but it's strictly speaking not necessary in the headline if it's
present in the body of the commit notice.

 > 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.

This is actually somewhat unlikely, both for technical and social
reasons.  The technical reason is that a git submodule points to a
commit, not to a branch.

The social reason is that almost certainly Emacs will insist on
control of content of releases, and it's possible that in pre-release
branches the Emacs version of org-mode will not correspond exactly to
any commit in the upstream repository, and surely not to the tip of
any actively developed branch.

It's not a big deal from your point of view, but technically it means
that the view in logs and $VCS viewers would probably be just as
complicated.