Re: Git migration docs

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Tue, 2009-01-20 at 01:57 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> 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.

No, I find the cairo ChangeLog almost unreadable, largely because people 
don't mention what functions or files they changed as we would in a
normal ChangeLog.

[snip]
> 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.

That's theory. In practice people generally don't take that second
opportunity to improve their commit messages, or to review their changes
as they would when writing a ChangeLog message, maybe because time has
passed.
 
-- 
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