Re: Header lines of commit messages

[Romain Francoise <romain@orebokech.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> The header line that summarizes the commit conveys useless
> information.  It should state the essence of the change instead, so
> that people who use "bzr log --line" will be able to grasp the purpose
> of the change without looking at the full text.

For changes that are made directly in Emacs, yes.

In this case, org-mode is maintained outside Emacs and I'm just
merging a fix from the original repository. If we followed the logic
that the header line should always accurately describe the change,
we wouldn't allow commits like these either:

100593: Romain Francoise 2010-06-12 Synch with Gnus trunk.
100575: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-06-10 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
100541: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-06-07 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
100498: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-06-02 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
100428: Ryan Yeske 2010-05-24 rcirc update.
100277: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-05-14 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
100255: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-05-13 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
100243: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-05-12 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
100228: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-05-11 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
100214: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-05-10 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
100180: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-05-07 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
100160: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-05-06 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk.
99989: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-04-22 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk:
99727: Katsumi Yamaoka 2010-03-23 [merge] Synch with Gnus trunk
98224: Katsumi Yamaoka 2009-10-19 Synch with Gnus trunk:
97798: Katsumi Yamaoka 2009-09-28 Synch with Gnus trunk.
97797: Katsumi Yamaoka 2009-09-28 Synch with Gnus trunk.
96612: Katsumi Yamaoka 2009-07-17 Synch with Gnus trunk:
96020: Katsumi Yamaoka 2009-06-08 Synch with Gnus trunk:
83292: Michael Albinus 2007-12-23 Sync with Tramp 2.1.12.
81049: Michael Albinus 2007-10-10 Sync with Tramp 2.1.11.
78711: Michael Albinus 2007-07-22 Sync with Tramp 2.1.10.
74948: Michael Albinus 2006-12-30 Sync with Tramp 2.0.55.
72532: Michael Albinus 2006-08-29 Sync with Tramp 2.0.54.

Instead we'd ask people to replay each logical change from the
original repository in Emacs, and we'd always have meaningful header
lines.

> The info about the commit number, if it's deemed to be important,
> should be in the body of the commit message, not in the header
> line.

It's a merge. Where it came from is just as important as what it
does, and the fact that it's a single commit rather than a bunch of
unrelated changes doesn't really change anything.

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. Then doing such a merge would not lose
information. But we're stuck with bzr + patch.