On 04/04/12 10:31, Daniel Friesen wrote:
We have a policy of restricting the length of the first line. Since it's used by gerrit as email subjects. So as a result when I write the first line of a git commit I inevitably leave out critical information. So the first line of a commit misses out information that if I had a RELEASE-NOTES line to write would be in there.
Also, I've noticed that a decent portion of my commits are small backend stuff or modifications. Stuff which have little business being inside RELEASE-NOTES. Frankly if we do it that way RELEASE-NOTES becomes little more than a commit log, which is a lot less valuable than the RELEASE-NOTES we currently have.
I agree with this. Usually I target commit messages at developers and release notes messages at users. Sometimes that means that the two texts have nothing in common at all.
I think the release notes could go further down in the commit message, perhaps with a footer style similar to Gerrit's Change-Id, for example:
Refactored Foo.php, splitting animal classes from vegetable classes
* Used closures for EVERYTHING * (bug 98765) Fixed a spelling error in a CSS class name
Release-Notes: (bug 98765) Renamed CSS class .foo-arbitary to .foo-arbitrary
-- Tim Starling