Re: How much explanation to include in change descriptions

[Paul Eggert]

Richard Stallman wrote:

> It is useful to include a reference to the bug data base.
> But don't omit anything on the assumption that people have access to
> that data base.

That's asking for too much, and in practice developers typically don't do what's 
being asked for. Many bug reports are complex, and one must read them carefully 
to understand the bugs. We can't reasonably ask developers to write and read 
commit messages containing every detail of every report of a bug that was fixed. 
On the contrary: the GNU bug database is a useful tool for simplifying 
maintenance, and we should take advantage of it when that is a win.

> By comparision, this alternative text
>
>    > Fix .gdbinit to work with Lisp_Word (Bug#29957)
>
> is unhelpfully terse: it makes people work harder to understand the change.

We could change the line to:

Fix .gdbinit when Lisp_Word is pointer (Bug#29957)

as this captures the detail that was missing in the too-terse version.