From: Rafaël Carré <rafael.carre_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:39:28 +0200

2010/9/15 Jonathan Gordon <jdgordy_at_gmail.com>:
> When is it read? users only read it when it happens (or soon (<6m)
> afterwards ) to see what development they might have missed, probably
> looking for keywords of interest to them. Devs (speaking from my
> experience here) do the users thing, but when the message is actually
> important is when you are trying to track down a possible breaking
> change, and even then (as I said a few replies ago) the message isnt
> even the first thing I look for.) And then when I find a possible
> change I look at the diff before rereading the message (because I know
> it cant possibly explain everything).

It happens frequently to me that I'm reading the full log of a particular file
or folder (with or without the diff), and especially when it's an area that I
don't know.

Please think that all your logs can and will be read in years from now and
any info which could help the future devs to understand the code is nice.

It's quite frequent that you are trying to understand why a line of code was
committed 8 years ago and you wish the committer had explained better
what he did. (ok perhaps not very frequent but it did happen to me and
other people in different projects)

BTW i don't think i would use commit log edits to change "fix red" to a more
descriptive message, but it could be used to fix typos or add
missing/forgotten info.

If you look at http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-cvslog/2010-August/date.html
you will see they changed commit logs 20 times last month (they demand
very high log
quality though)

-- 
Rafaël Carré

Received on 2010-09-15