Re: Please can we write informative commit messages?

[Fred Kiefer]

I fully agree with you that we need more meaningful commit and ChangeLog 
messages. But if it is "trivial to automatically generate a ChangeLog from a 
commit log“ why did you fail to do so for your last commit? Could you please 
add this?

Fred

> Am 06.04.2018 um 11:52 schrieb David Chisnall <address@hidden>:
> 
> 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