Re: Git migration docs

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 14:38 -0500, Kristian Høgsberg wrote: 
>> I don't see many references or much reasoning here, just assertions.
>> How is it not possible for a disciplined developer, who's trained to
>> commit small, self contained changes and document them in a ChangeLog to
>> apply that same discipline to writing a good commit message instead?
>> Look to the kernel, cairo, the X.org modules for examples of projects
>> that successfully use the VCS commit messages and no ChangeLog.  I don't
>> think it's justified or necessary to call the people who work on these
>> projects lazy and selfish.
> 
> No, those projects don't write good-enough commit messages and their
> generated ChangeLogs are not good enough. The routine has made people
> lazy and allowed them to be selfish. Of course there are plenty of
> projects that are far worse, regardless of use of git.

It's all about discipline.  We have high standards in cairo and our commit
messages are quality stuff.


> I think I understand why it happens. But more importantly it _does_ happen 
> whether you believe it should or not.

It has not happened in any of the projects I work on.  Many of them using git.

> Good. The correlation between pro-git people and anti-changelog people
> has been my number one fear about a migration to git, even more than my
> fear of people having difficulty using git.

Taking advantage of what git provides over svn and using hand-written
ChangeLog's are inherently incompatible.  That's why you see that correlation.

In another message (that I cannot find now), you said that a
commit-message-based approach is not good because the code is only committed
after it's reviewed, and that's too late to write good change logs.  That's
the SVN mindset.  With git, you commit any code that you think is ready.  You
are only committing to your local repo.  You then share those commits (it's
more often than not multiple commits, not one) for review either by pushing to
your public repo, or (autoatically or manually) sending patches to bugzilla or
mailing lists, with the commit message introducing the patch.

behdad