On Mon, 31 Jul 2017, Richard Stallman wrote:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> I was surprised to see this output from `make'.  What does this do?
> It seems fundamentally unmodular for building Emacs from sources
> to concern itself in any way with how you got those sources.
>
> Configuring local git repository...
> ‘.git/config’ -> ‘.git/config.~1~’
> git config transfer.fsckObjects 'true'
> git config diff.elisp.xfuncname '^\(def[^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+([^()[:space:]]+)'
> git config diff.m4.xfuncname '^((m4_)?define|A._DEFUN(_ONCE)?)\([^),]*'
> git config diff.make.xfuncname '^([$.[:alnum:]_].*:|[[:alnum:]_]+[[:space:]]*([*:+]?[:?]?|!?)=|define .*)'
> git config diff.shell.xfuncname '^([[:space:]]*[[:alpha:]_][[:alnum:]_]*[[:space:]]*\(\)|[[:alpha:]_][[:alnum:]_]*=)'
> git config diff.texinfo.xfuncname '^@node[[:space:]]+([^,[:space:]][^,]+)'
> Installing git hooks...
> ‘build-aux/git-hooks/commit-msg’ -> ‘.git/hooks/commit-msg’
> ‘build-aux/git-hooks/pre-commit’ -> ‘.git/hooks/pre-commit’
> ‘.git/hooks/applypatch-msg.sample’ -> ‘.git/hooks/applypatch-msg’
> ‘.git/hooks/pre-applypatch.sample’ -> ‘.git/hooks/pre-applypatch’

This stuff is run just once, the first time you build.  In some sense
you are doing more than just building Emacs from its sources: your
are cloning the Emacs repository; some configuration of this repository
might be expected.

Those hooks ensure that some minimum guidelines are fulfilled: for 
instance, things like limit the number of characters for a line
within a commit message.