On 12/02/07 05:05, Samuel Tardieu wrote:
Maybe we should consider dropping ChangeLogs and using better checkin messages.
I'm not sure people will want to drop ChangeLogs anytime soon. I don't find them all that useful, but I *have* used them extensively when doing archeology. It gives you the initial thread to pull when finding out about changes.
What I *do* miss a lot is a an easier way to link from the ChangeLog entry into the email message explaining the whys and hows of a change. In this respect, the comment in the code is not enough. The comment explains what the code does today, it does not (and should not) explain the history of that piece of code. Otherwise, comments would soon grow to useless proportions.
The history is something one finds on the mailing lists. So, my proposal is to add a commit-time check that makes sure that the commit message contains a URL to the message describing the change. IIUC, such check shouldn't be hard to implement (Dan?)
I try to do that with fixed PRs. When closing one, I usually add a link to the message explaining the fix.
The only annoying issue with this proposal is that it forces the committer to fish out the message URL from the mailing lists, so perhaps we could make the check a warning instead of an error.
Thoughts? Diego.
