Re: log format for vc-bzr

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

Andreas Schwab writes:

 > A commit message should describe the changes in the change set, not some
 > random external incident.

Bazaar fans (and Mercurial fans, for that matter) do not consider
merges to be random external incidents.  They consider a merge to be a
very high level editing operation, which has implications for testing
and other aspects of the development process, and therefore should be
noted in the history.  Eg, you must run the system tests again, and
you should run the unit tests again, too, at least if there were
concurrent changes to a unit.  The merged code base is an untested
code base.

This is true in a rebase as well.  You still have to retest after a
rebase.  But because rebasing turns the merge into a fast-forward, the
merge turd goes away.