Re: Summarizing the purpose of a change.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Karl,

On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 01:09:19AM -0600, Karl Fogel wrote:
> I'm using the change below as an example for a more general question:

> In many projects, there is a convention of summarizing the purpose of a
> change in one or two sentences at the start of the log entry.  This
> makes the rest of the log entry (and the change itself) easier to
> understand.

> Could we try that in Emacs?  Or is there some reason we don't do it?

I do this every time.  So far, nobody's complained.

> For example, for the change below, even after reading the entire log
> entry it's hard to figure out what the committer's overall intention
> was.  Is it just a bunch of random improvements that happen to be sent
> in one commit?  Or is it a unified change group all made toward one
> overall purpose?  I'm not sure.  I guess I could figure it out if I
> looked at the diff, but the committer already knows the answer...

> (Nothing about this change looks wrong, I hasten to add, and it's great
> that Stefan is cleaning stuff up.  It would just a lot easier to
> evaluate the change, and follow what's going on in general, if one knew
> the intentions.  In this case, even just saying "Random code cleanups
> and minor bug fixes" would help set the right mood for the reviewer.)

Agreed.

> -Karl

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).