Re: ChangeLog and commit messages

[Po Lu]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> If your problems are with the feature branch, then I think you are
> making your life harder than it needs to be.  Our conventions for
> formatting commit log messages don't apply to feature branches.  On
> feature branches, the developers are free to format the log messages
> as they see fit; the only log message that matters is the one for the
> merge-commit which lands the feature branch on master (which you have
> to create by hand anyway).
>
> The upshot of all this is that while you are working on a feature
> branch:
>
>   . you can use short single-line note-like log messages, which might
>     be unclear to anyone but yourself
>   . you should generally commit each time when you finish some
>     meaningful changeset, so that it could be later reverted without
>     complications -- this goes well with short log messages
>   . it is futile to use "C-x 4 a"-style log messages, especially for
>     changes in files or in functions the branch adds, because in the
>     final commit log we only need to see "foo: New file"
>
> This leaves you with the need to come up with a commit log for when
> the branch is landed.  That might sometimes be a large job, but it
> will be much smaller than the sum total of what you do now.  Moreover,
> what you do now will not help you avoid this job, because we do
> require3 a meaningful summary log message for when the branch is
> merged.

OK, thanks for explaining.