Metaproblem, part 3

[Eric S. Raymond]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>:
> Every commit should come with a commit message, yes.
> And every commit message should use the ChangeLog format (plus
> a summary if appropriate).
> And every commit message should be duplicated in the ChangeLog file.

But Paul Eggert said: "It's not needed for one-liners."

So not only do we have commenting conventions that are duplicative,
fussy, and undocumented, the senior developers seem not to agree on the
details.

Hello?  Hello?  Am I the only one that sees a problem here?

I've been hacking on Emacs since before it was GNU Emacs and now *I*
feel like I'm walking on eggshells and the overhead of contributing is
irritatingly high.  How much more forbidding do you suppose it is for
J. Random Junior Hacker?

Put differently: #emacs has over 500 regulars.  It appears to me that
no more than a dozen, if that, have contributed a line of code to the
development tree.  Does nobody in the project leadership ever think
about what that implies?

My next commit will be me diligently attempting to comply with
Stefan's instruction.  And thinking that a hell of a lot besides the
version-control system needs to change around here.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>