Re: *** empty log message *** is a no-no

[Denys Duchier <Denys.Duchier@ps.uni-sb.de>]

Jan Vroonhof <vroonhof@math.ethz.ch> writes:

> No they are very useful for concurrent development.

useful, but not appropriate.  what ultimately matters is the record of
committed changes.

> However I think you mean concurrent development where everybody
> commits often.  I am thinking of shared development over the
> internet where typically one commits complete bits of work.

My experience also comes from `internet' development projects.  Our
main project involves groups in germany, sweden and belgium.  We do
commit often (especially when responding to bug reports).  Personally,
I have several projects in computational linguistics that involve
multiple sites and a number of students modifying and extending a code
base that I provide and maintain.  And then, there are papers and
course material to be co-authored, documentation to be collaboratively
written, tools to be maintained, databases to be updated, etc...  I
don't know if my case is atypical; maybe you're right.

> > > Is the resolution on the time stamps that important?
> 
> In internet based collaborative effort timescales are of the order of
> days anyway, so the resolution of one day is sufficient.

well, not in my experience, but I guess your mileage may vary.  My
main beef with this is that empty log messages just don't help me any.
And saying "see ChangeLog file" also does not help (see what?).  I
want `C-x v l' to give me an informative log history of the file.

Second, empty log messages (or "see ChangeLog file") in the cvs
newsgroup are totally useless.  They defeat the purpose of having such
a newsgroup.

However, not being a gnus developer myself, my opinion is hardly the
one that really matters here.

Cheers,

-- 
Dr. Denys Duchier			Denys.Duchier@ps.uni-sb.de
Forschungsbereich Programmiersysteme	(Programming Systems Lab)
Universitaet des Saarlandes, Geb. 45	http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier
Postfach 15 11 50			Phone: +49 681 302 5618
66041 Saarbruecken, Germany		Fax:   +49 681 302 5615