Commit practices

[Eric S. Raymond]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>:
> I once posted a summary that I know about; see:
> 
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-11/msg00229.html
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-11/msg00234.html
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-11/msg00312.html
> 
> Richard commented here, basically approving my summary:
> 
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-11/msg00276.html
> 
> I suggested at the time to have these guidelines under admin/ but I
> guess no one volunteered to do that yet.

I had certainly never seen these guidelines before.  I may have been
violating them a lot recently simply because of the way VC-mode now
works.

Because VC now does group commits, I have been using the following
style: 

(1) Make a coherent group of changes.

(2) Write Changelog text describing them.

(3) Do a group commit, *including the Changelog*.  In the comment buffer, 
paste the text I wrote in step 2, tab-stripped.

I did it this way for a reason.  Someday we are going to want to
migrate the CVS tree to a VCS that has real changesets.  We're almost
certainly going to do it with a tool functionally like cvs2svn that
tries to reconstruct commit groups using date, the content of the
comments, and possibly this Commit-ID thing I see in the CVS logs. It
will be helpful, when we do that, if there as many similarities across
related commits as possible for the migration tool to grab onto.

This brings up the large topic of what to do about our workflow,
our tools, and the sad fact that Eli's guidelines (while intelligent
in their way) are basically an attempt to put lipstick on a pig.  What
we should really do is stop kissing the damned pig.

But that's a topic for another thread, which I'll start with my next post.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>