Re: git history tracking across renames (and emacs support)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden, address@hidden
> Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2018 18:51:52 -0400
> 
>   > It doesn't help that dropping the current format makes the commit logs
>   > deteriorate in quality in every project I saw (present parties
>   > excluded, of course).
> 
> Could you show examples of what you mean?
> This could be a very important issue.

I agree it's important, but I'm not sure this is the right place to
discuss it.  But since you asked, I'll show a typical example.

GNU enscript stopped using ChangeLog in 2014.  Since then the log
messages look like this:

  commit 0779ca6512bf93e8f8dfe53c1a3446adb2475acc
  Author:     Werner Fink <address@hidden>
  AuthorDate: Tue Jan 23 15:26:50 2018 +0100

      Simply avoid warnings of modern gcc

      Signed-off-by: Werner Fink <address@hidden>
      Signed-off-by: James Cloos <address@hidden>

  commit 1b76685a8e405f54bae2b0f131588e8018e80f71
  Author:     Werner Fink <address@hidden>
  AuthorDate: Tue Jan 23 15:26:49 2018 +0100

      Mention options for helper apps in manual page

      Signed-off-by: Werner Fink <address@hidden>
      Signed-off-by: James Cloos <address@hidden>

  commit 9cccf335aafe68d04f6b4daeeb435e5188db4acb
  Author:     Werner Fink <address@hidden>
  AuthorDate: Tue Jan 23 15:26:48 2018 +0100

      Add optional address for mailto option

      Signed-off-by: Werner Fink <address@hidden>
      Signed-off-by: James Cloos <address@hidden>

  commit 3638fc4643436b27b4fd034416d77651a057fc42
  Author:     Werner Fink <address@hidden>
  AuthorDate: Tue Jan 23 15:26:47 2018 +0100

      Flexible encoding and support of locale paper size

      as well paper size names known by ghostscript

      Signed-off-by: Werner Fink <address@hidden>
      Signed-off-by: James Cloos <address@hidden>

  commit a356d343aa9db52b75432cde927b6f9bad6a7c44
  Author:     Werner Fink <address@hidden>
  AuthorDate: Tue Jan 23 15:26:45 2018 +0100

      Automake 1.12 and up no longer supports pre-ANSI

      Signed-off-by: Werner Fink <address@hidden>
      Signed-off-by: James Cloos <address@hidden>

etc.  You can see the whole thing here:

   http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/enscript.git/log/

I see something similar in many projects, except that "old hands" like
Paul Eggert, Jim Meyering, and others still write log entries in GNU
style, so where these guys are active, the overall picture is not too
bad.  But others don't, and their entries are much less informative.