[Savannah-help-public] Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Re: Reviewing changes

[Yavor Doganov]

Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> 
> Is it possible to clarify this request?

Until a few months ago, the Emacs commit policy was to commit every
file separately, with the commit message specific for the change of
that file, and afterwards to commit the ChangeLog with no commit
message.  AFAIU, this was in order not to clutter "cvs log".

To illustrate, a change like this

   * configure.in: Check for librsvg under NS.
   * src/image.c (svg_load_image): Add support for NS.
   * lisp/term/ns-win.el: Handle svg_foo.

ought to happen in 4 commits -- one per all the files involved with
the corresponding relevant commit message, and one with no message for
the top-level ChangeLog, src/ChangeLog and lisp/ChangeLog.

The commit notifications were done by this criterion -- emacs-commit
got only the commit messages, and emacs-diffs the actuall diffs, one
message per file (even if multiple files were commited as a
changeset).

Now, pending the move to a more modern VCS (Bzr), it was pointed out
that a coherent change touching multiple files is best to be done as a
single commit, because it will show as a single revision when the
conversion is done.

Karl Fogel said that it is also better for code reviews, and Stefan
(Emacs maintainer) asked to modify the notifications setup.

That's it, basically.  I CC'ed this list FYI, as all of this happened
on emacs-devel and I thought that all modifications to project commit
notifications should happen via the Savannah people.  I might be wrong
about this, though.