Re: [Emacs-diffs] trunk r113589: Merge: Add vc-ignore.

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

Xue Fuqiao writes:
 > On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Stefan Monnier
 > <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
 > >> +     (cvs-append-to-ignore): Moved from pcvs.el.
 > >
 > > Please use the present tense in ChangeLog entries.
 > 
 > So, what should it be?  Is "Moving from pcvs.el" appropriate?  My
 > grammar isn't very good.

"Move here from pcvs.el." would be good.

"Moving" is the "present participle", not the present tense.  The idea
is to use the simple present tense to describe the change (not what
was lacking) and to indicate what the developer was thinking when he
executed the change.  If this is done consistently, there's no
confusion between undesirable (pre-change) states and corrected
states.  Native speakers often use past tense to describe the buggy
state: "Emacs crashed when user did X", with "change Y fixes this"
implied.  But it's hard (for a native speaker) to write "Emacs crashes
..." when it's already fixed.  So the discipline of use present tense
tends to implicitly enforce the discipline of describing the change,
not the bug.

But hey, we're using English.  You'd think Emacs devs when know when to
"unset GRAMMAR_ME_HARDER".