Re: Should we restore manually maintained ChangeLogs

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> You (and some others) say the format and the content in the log
> messages are important, and I agree.  But if we do care about them,
> how can we NOT clean them up?

We can care about them, but agree to fix them up only until they become part of 
history. Once they're history we don't worry about trying to change history; 
they're just old mistakes that are part of the log but are not otherwise part of 
the current Emacs. If managed well, this can help motivate contributors to write 
good commit messages the first time. This approach is not perfect, but it works 
reasonably well in other projects and it is way easier to explain and to 
maintain than what we're doing now, or what we did a year ago.

With version control systems our natural perfectionist inclinations can cause us 
to want to rewrite history to make ourselves look more error-free than we 
actually were.  In extreme cases (e.g., massive copyright infringement committed 
by a rogue developer) we would indeed need to rewrite history, despite all the 
hassles that would ensue with Git (hassle that would not be limited to 
commit-message contents!). However, in ordinary use we should resist the 
temptation to change history; at best it's makework.

So, for example, we should strive to get the "tiny change" stuff right the first 
time in commit messages; but if we make mistakes in that area it OK -- the sky 
will not fall down, and software archaeologists of the future will still be able 
to figure things out well enough.