Re: [Bug-wget] [Bug-Wget] Policy on commit messages

[Tim Rühsen]

Am Samstag, 1. November 2014, 05:43:11 schrieb Darshit Shah:
> Hi,
> 
> In the last few days we've seen a huge flurry of activity and a large number
> of patches have been committed to the code base. As someone who was
> traveling and hence unable to keep up with the mailing lists, I tried to
> catch up by looking at the code base and the changes that have been made.
> 
> It would turn out that the commit messages aren't very informative on the
> last few commits. Unless I know the context of the change from the mailing
> list, it would be very difficult to understand why that particular change
> was important. Both the ChangeLog and commit messages usually only describe
> the change in literal terms but not in their logical reasoning.
> 
> I propose that henceforth, all commits be reviewed for detailed descriptions
> of not only the syntactical changes, but also the logical reasons behind
> the change. This will help us in the long term to follow through the
> changes in the code base and also make it easier for new contributors to
> understand why some things are the way they are.

As I understood, for GNU projects we have very detailed ChangeLog entries and 
thus very short commit messages.

I am not going to make detailed ChangeLog entries AND detailed commit 
messages.

If we move to detailed commit messages (I would appreciate it), then we should 
autogenerate ChangeLog files from the commit messages. You will find many 
projects out there already doing so.

If we can agree upon a frame or method, I would also appreciate a 'reason 
field' for the changes. If it is not redundant. E.g. a commit message like 
'fixing double free()' stands for itself.

Tim

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