Commit messages

[Joel Sherrill]

On 01/23/2012 02:31 AM, Sebastian Huber wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I think we should write down (or copy from somewhere else) some standard for
> the commit messages.  How to format it and what to put in it.  Maybe also some
> standard phrases.
>
I was hoping someone else would post first but here is what I
personally would like to see.

I think ChangeLog's need to continue to exist.  They are part
of the GNU Coding Standard and useful to those getting releases.

My first thought was to treat the git commit long as a nice title
for the change and put more details in a ChangeLog entry. That
fits nicely with browsing the history and getting useful info in
a short space.

According to multiple sites on the net, they CAN be generated
automatically from git but I don't know if this would be the right
thing to do.  Would this be useful to be done behind the scenes
as part of commiting? I don't know.

I do not want to see us drop having history embedded in the
source tree via a ChangeLog.

--joel