Keith Miller recently started various discussions about this, the latest in #dev on Slack:
> Have we reconsidered the expectation/requirement to list of changed > files in the commit message? IMO, it makes it much harder to read > the git log output as most folks don't even put a file-by-file > comment in the message anyway. If I care about the history of one > file I would just git log Source/foo/bar so that doesn't seem like > a good trade off. Let me also quote Geoffrey Garen, who provided context for why we have this in the first place: > My memory is that Darin wrote the original PERL script, and the > intention was to provide a structure for per-file comments. If my > memory is right, probably nobody will defend the degenerate case > where you leave a list of files with no comments. It’s a > misunderstanding to explain that git can tell you the same list. > That was never the goal. > > For commits that explain everything per file, but occasionally > don’t explain a file because it’s trivial, probably the best thing > is to group the file with other files that get the same comment, > or, if the change is truly trivial, remove the file from the list > entirely. And Darin Adler: > [W]e never intended to have people just leave a massive list of > files and functions without comments. But few people seemed to > understand that; the point of making the list was to encourage you > to think about each change and possibly undo changes that don’t > make sense, explain each change. > > These are decisions we made a long time ago — I do find that my > changes are better when I carefully review them and try to explain > what I am doing. > > [...] If everyone is saying "I just write one comment above and > ignore the file and function list" than clearly we don’t need the > file and function list. The comments are supposed to say why we are > changing things, not what we are changing. [...] > > We should definitely delete the file and function list if there’s > no comments in there. Based on this, I have proposed a change that slightly tweaks the advice in the commit message template to make people consider removing lines of files and functions without corresponding comments: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/44932. If there's no objections I'll merge that next week. _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list webkit-dev@lists.webkit.org https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
