Re: Advice on commit comments

[Pierre Asselin]

Roddie <address@hidden> wrote:
> I've been using CVS to manage website development for a couple of months,
> and find that I am committing quite often.

Good.

> I have a development sandbox on my Mac laptop and a live sandbox on my Linux
> co-lo. I find I'm making smallish edits on the Mac and then needing to
> commit them and update the co-lo to see the effect there. The co-lo files
> are used among other things to see how the site looks on a PC. CVS makes
> this so much easier than it used to be!

You can even make it automatic,
http://ximbiot.com/cvs/manual/cvs-1.11.21/cvs_18.html#SEC177

> But I'm unsure of how much detail to put in the commit comments. Can anyone
> advise on useful/common/best practice. For example, should I edit out the
> CVS at the beginning of some of the lines so that the list of add/modified
> files is not removed automatically? Are most commit comments just a few
> words, or is it typical for some to be lengthy descriptions. Currently there
> is only me using the repository, but I envisage a time when there will be
> other users.

It depends what you do with them.  I use cvs2cl
(http://www.red-bean.com/cvs2cl/)
to summarize my logs, so I like one- or two-liners that describe
the purpose of the commit, more if many files are committed at
once.  I leave the "CVS" lines commented out since that information
is reconstructed by cvs2cl and I use it only to compose my commit
message.

-- 
pa at panix dot com