Please can we write informative commit messages?

[David Chisnall]

Hello,

I realise that the GNUstep conventions recommend writing a ChangeLog entry 
rather than a sensible commit log, but this makes it quite painful to navigate 
the project history.  Tools like git blame and git log make it easy to see the 
history of a particular file or directory.  The GitHub web interface also 
provides convenient displays of these.  For example, if I want to see what the 
recent changes in NSLock.m were about, I can look at:

https://github.com/gnustep/libs-base/commits/master/Source/NSLock.m

If I found a bug, I can use this page to see who last touched the line of code 
and why:

https://github.com/gnustep/libs-base/blame/master/Source/NSLock.m

Having to find the ChangeLog entry that corresponds to a change is an 
unnecessary indirection.  Trying to go the other way is impossible - the 
changelog entries include only a date not a revision so if I want to see the 
diff associated with a ChangeLog entry the only way I can do so is by running 
git blame on the ChangeLog and finding the corresponding entry.

It is trivial to automatically generate a ChangeLog from a commit log, but 
decidedly nontrivial to do the reverse.

Looking at our recent commit messages, they’re almost all non-informative.  
This creates a barrier for entry for new developers, because no one under the 
age of 40 would think to go and look in the ChangeLog to try to understand the 
motivation behind a change.

Please can we join the mid 1990s?

David