Use of "Action stamps" in commit messages (WAS: [Emacs-diffs] master babe0d4: Rearrange definition of zerop in subr.el)

[Noam Postavsky]

.On 12 July 2018 at 11:34, Basil L. Contovounesios <address@hidden> wrote:

> from CONTRIBUTE:
>
>   One way to identify revisions is by quoting their summary line.
>   Another is with an action stamp - an RFC3339 date followed by !
>   followed by the committer's email - for example,
>   "2014-01-16T05:43:address@hidden".

This reminds that I'd like to remove this "Action stamp" thing as
commit message convention. Action stamps are fine for what they were
designed for: acting as a unique commit id for the repository
conversion software "reposurgeon", but they are not very friendly to
human readers.

A date followed by the summary line is sufficient to identify a commit
in a vc system agnostic way, reads nicer, and gives more info up front
to a human.

See also Bug#20609.

https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20609