Re: Commit practices

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    > In effect, the suggestion here is that we abandon the idea
    > of useful readable info associated by the VCS with each file.

    Right.  Information about changes is most useful when it has *changeset*
    granularity, not file granularity.

That form is very useful, but we already have it in the ChangeLog
file.  Having a duplicate of that in the VCS does no harm, but doesn't
add anything either.

RCS and CVS logs give the information per file.  That adds something
precisely because it is different: it is convenient for looking at the
history of one file.  However, if one file's CVS log gets full of
change info for other files, then it is harder to use the CVS logs
for this purpose, which means they are not as useful.

If we switch to maintaining VCS logs in changeset terms, we will
entirely lose the feature of convenient presentation of one file's
changes.  That would mean going back to the situation as it was
in 1990, when all we had was ChangeLog.

Just ChangeLog was sufficient in 1990, and it would be sufficient
again, but it is nonetheless a change for the worse.

Perhaps we could substitute for that lost capability
with a new feature in Change Log mode to selectively display
the items that pertain to a certain file.