Commit messages.

[Ted Lemon <mellon hoffman vix com>]

I'm just now going through the commit messages on gtkbox.c to see if a
problem I'm having is the result of a change, or if it's always been
that way.   The commit messages for this are completely useless - it
looks like I'm going to just have to diff all the versions to see if
there's a relevant change.

The commit messages seem to be ChangeLog entries for large commits,
rather than messages that document the specific change being committed
to a specific file.   That is, if you make the following change to
gtkbox.c:

-	int i = 0;
+	int i = 1;

The commit message will mention a bunch of changes to gtkwidget.c and
gtkwidget.h, but may not mention any change at all to gtkbox.c,
because (I presume) that change was considered to be too unimportant
to mention.

When I do commits on projects where I have commit access (I don't have
gtk commit access), I commit my changes one file at a time, and
mention each significant change to the file, as well as what it's
related to (if appropriate).   Keeping a ChangeLog is great, but
ChangeLog messages and cvs commit messages are two different things,
and shouldn't be confused.

Being a user with no power to set policy, this is obviously just my
random flame about this practice and can be taken with a grain of
salt, but I really hope people will pay attention to this - the
current commit message practice produces *huge* commit logs with an
extremely poor signal to noise ratio.

			       _MelloN_