Re: [PATCH 4/6] gnu: linux-libre-beagle-bone-black: Remove kernel variant.

[John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au>]

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On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 04:24:10PM +0200, Vincent Legoll wrote:
     Hello,
     
     @David: the following question is nothing against you, I just
     took the opportunity to ask, sorry for the thread hijacking.
     
     On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 3:23 PM, John Darrington wrote:
     > Why are we removing this?
     
     Is it just me finding this changelog format usefulness to be
     very low ?
     

I entirely agree.   

Our current convention for commit messages is aesthetically pleasing,
but useless.   It is redundant to put in the message WHAT has changed.
That can be easily determined by running "git show".   What is much
more usefull is the reason WHY we changed it.


Recently, on another project,  I came across a line of code which I
was pretty sure was pointless.  I was about to delete it - but I 
decided to check first.  So I ran "git blame" to find out which 
commit had added it.  Then I ran git show to get the full details
of that commit.   Fortunately, the person who had committed it 5 years
ago had mentioned exactly why it was needed.  - and it was there
for a very valid reason too.   Had we been using the Guix convention,
this would probably have been deleted and consequences would have
followed.

I vote that we make the reason for a commit to be compulsory.  All
other details optional.


J'



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