Re: [Monotone-devel] 0.48 rants

[Patrick Georgi]

Am 17.07.2010 09:40, schrieb CooSoft Support:
> I'm not currently using 0.48 and from what I hear nor will I. I to want
> comments to go in unmolested and not have white space stripped out. For
> me that is a must.
I didn't look at the code, but that should only be empty lines before or
after the commit message.

> Why are date and author changeable? Surely these should be immutable
> (apart from one could specify an alternate key on which to perform the
> checkin - I assume that the same restriction applies when changing the
> author in the changelog (i.e. you have to have a private key for that
> user in your keys directory).
There's a difference between author and committer (though by default
they're the same). You can also do that pre-0.48 using --author, and
change the date with --date, this change merely allows you to do that
all at once in the commit message editor.

The rationale is that you might want to commit something for someone
else, eg. a patch sent to you. The "author" field gives attribution to
the original author, while the signatures created with your key certify
that the change was committed by you.

For the same reason, people might want to change the date field.

> I also agree that the changelog that the user enters should go at the
> top. When working with GUIs you quickly learn that trying to slow a user
> down and make him/her think about the consequences of what they are
This wasn't about "think about the consequences", but about having a
consistent layout for commit messages in log and commit. Probably
misguided, but the only way to get reliable feedback is to have people
use it - and it seems there was no-one who complained about it pre-0.48.

I guess moving the changelog to the top (and all the metadata into
commented lines below it) will go a long way to improve the usability of
that feature.


Patrick