Re: trunk r115265: * lisp/vc/vc-dispatcher.el (vc-log-edit): Setup the Summary&Author headers.

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> I think of this "reminding" as a process rather than a one-time event,
>> so I'm not too worried about it being "too late".
>> It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing, I think.
> If people not mentioning actual authors of contributed patches in ChangeLog
> is a real problem (I'm not sure it is), how about augmenting the ChangeLog
> font-locking instead, to highlight this field more prominently, prepend it
> with ephemeral text "Author:", and/or add help echo that would remind them
> that this field is for the actual author and their email.

Note that a solution that applies only to ChangeLog wouldn't help for
the `elpa' branch.  And hopefully at some point it won't help for
`emacs' either because we'll have finally rid ourselves of the
ChangeLog files.

> I've seen many times people include several entirely unrelated changes in
> one commit.  How does one write a summary line for them?

That's the problem of the committer.  The notion of "summary" is not
my invention.  It was there in GNU Arch, is there is Bzr, and is probably
present in several other VCSes.

> As long as point is after ":" when the buffer is created and `C-a' is bound
> to `messge-beginning-of-line', I think the main drawback would be that it's
> different from the other Git commit message edit interfaces I know (and
> people might be used to), namely Vim and Magit.

> Both of them implicitly consider the first line to be the summary, and they
> indicate with highlighting when it exceeds 50 characters.

We still also support the "first line is summary", for the sake of grumpy
users, but that doesn't extend naturally to Author, Fixes, Amend, ...

> Adding special, summary-header-targeted highlighting would improve
> the situation.

We could easily highlight Summary specially after the Nth character.
[ Not sure why it should be 50, and that number might need to
  depend on the backend, but other than that, I don't see
  any particular difficulty.  ]

> Actually, now that I've checked, `C-c C-k' in both `message-mode' and
> git-commit-mode' that Magit uses kill the buffer after doing some cleanup,
> not bury it. Would you be fine with that?

Seems a bit pointless since C-x k (and kill-this-buffer) works as well
for *VC-Log*, AFAIK.

> I think it can look better than using a separate window.  But then again,
> it's how other editors do it, so it might just be more familiar.

I used a separate window because it seemed easier, avoiding the usual
problems with display-only-text or with text-that-will-disappear, which
both can lead to surprising behaviors for the unsuspecting user.


        Stefan