Re: Your commit 7409a79

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>   commit 7409a79b1b2acf1229dd763f5eb7b96abc17113a
>   Author: Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>
>   Date:   Fri Dec 5 13:13:55 2014 -0600
>
>       preparing for further changes/cleanup to developers/contributors docs
>
>       * etc/CONTRIBUTE: renamed to ./CONTRIBUTE,
>
> Please always start the commit log summary line with a capital letter,
> and end the sentence with a period.

Do we really need to be so picky?

I agree there should be no comma here; that makes it an
incomplete statement.

But I don't think capitals and periods actually improve readability in
this context; it's _not_ a manual, nor a code comment.

Note that the Gnu coding standard does _not_ discuss this level of
detail, although all the examples do have capitals and periods
(http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Change-Logs.html#Change-Logs).

I see this pickiness as a mild barrier to contributing, so I'd like to
get some more rationale before I add this to CONTRIBUTE.

And then I'll have to write some elisp to do that level of formatting
(if someone hasn't already).

> (Actually, in the above
> particular case the summary line is redundant and could be omitted --
> but this is a stylistic comment, not a requirement.)

I tried that:

* etc/CONTRIBUTE: renamed to ./CONTRIBUTE, preparing for further changes/cleanup to developers/contributors docs

But that was rejected by the commit filter as being longer than 79
chars.

I didn't want to just do:

* etc/CONTRIBUTE: renamed to ./CONTRIBUTE

since that doesn't say anything about _why_.

> Also, renaming a file needs an entry in the target's ChangeLog,

Yes, I messed up the commit process. I did edit ChangeLog, but then
forgot to stage it (and no, I'm not using 'git commit -a'). It's in the
next commit. I'll get there.

> like this:
>
>   * CONTRIBUTE: Renamed from etc/CONTRIBUTE.
>
> and it also should end with a period, not a comma.

Yes, the comma was a cut-and-paste error from the first attempt.

--
-- Stephe