Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 8726de6: Finish excising electric indent from `open-line'

[David Kastrup]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> Oh, well.  Although mostly pleased with Emacs' transition to
>> distributed version control, I do miss one thing: being able to edit
>> log messages after the fact!
>
> Yes, that's a shortcoming of Git.  Hopefully it'll be fixed eventually.

It is a limitation, not a shortcoming.  The commit message is
intentionally part of the commit id and consequently part of the commit
graph.  You can rewrite messages when rebasing, but the result is a new
commit graph.  This ensures the integrity of the commit tree including
the original commit messages.

Consequently it will not "be fixed", ever.  It's part of the system
design.  For the purpose of automated ChangeLog generation/maintenance,
one could add additional information to commits (possibly including a
commit message for the sake of ChangeLog generation) with "git notes"
and integrate it at ChangeLog generation time.

But the canonical commit message itself is off-limits once the commit is
part of an accepted commit tree.

-- 
David Kastrup