Re: Using VC for change descriptions

[Joseph Myers]

On Sun, 7 Jan 2018, Richard Stallman wrote:

> Perhaps it would be good to do an experiment.
> 
> Someone who advocates not itemizing entities in the history
> could take the change log for some period of time and rewrite it
> to say what he believes we should include: a more extensive explanation
> of the change overall.
> 
> Then we can try understanding changes in two ways: based on change
> logs as we write them, and based on that rewritten history, and
> see whether it makes a big difference.

I suggest looking at the glibc commit logs that already exist.  I and many 
other contributors already write the overall explanation of the changeset 
as well as the ChangeLog entry (the ChangeLog entry then may or may not 
also be included in the text of the commit message, but for this purpose 
one would ignore it when trying to understand based on the commit messages 
- while remembering that the commit message can be read together with the 
diff itself when useful).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
address@hidden