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

[Paul Eggert]

On 07/13/2018 03:14 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I find the summary line to be a nuisance in too many cases.

Although the summary line is sometimes a nuisance to write, when done
well it is so useful that it's clearly a net win over our old way of
doing things. Many Git user interfaces list only the summary lines, and
for good reason: they let you quickly scan a list of commits looking for
what happened in those commits. Writing a useful summary line is thus a
real service to later developers, and is far more helpful than the file,
function and variable names that the GNU coding standards currently
require in ChangeLogs.

The primary UI that we promote on the web
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git> lists just summary lines. I
just now looked at the most recent ten summary lines in Emacs master,
and eight of them seemed useful. The two I found less useful were
"Unbreak bootstrap" (a motivation for the change, but not enough
description) and "Fix Bug#32107" (likewise). It'd be helpful for us to
encourage people to write commit messages with summary lines that are
suitable for later readers.