Re: Testing on PowerMac G4

["Yoshinori K. Okuji" <okuji@enbug.org>]

On Saturday 05 January 2008 03:02, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-01-05 at 02:27 +0100, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> > On Thursday 03 January 2008 16:28, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> > > >> Linux style description.  The first line is the synopsis.  If it
> > > >> doesn't fit 72 characters, the patch is a candidate for splitting.
> > > >> Then an empty line.  Then a more detailed description of the patch,
> > > >> including the motivation behind the changes.  The list of the
> > > >> affected files can be generated by the version control system.
> > > >
> > > > Looks good.  But I guess you'll have to convince Marco and Okuji
> > > > about this :-)
> > >
> > > Sure, it's in my TODO list :)
> >
> > I do not think automatically generated logs can be as precise as being
> > made by human.
> >
> > Anyway, there is no reason that you shouldn't write a detailed
> > description in ChangeLog. Indeed, I myself sometimes do that, when I make
> > a big change or something hard to understand.
>
> We are talking about a changeset from 2007-02-21 (the earliest of them),
> where the ChangeLog entry has the usual "calculate this" and "rename
> this to that".  It took me hours of experiments to figure out that the
> intention was to load the core image and the modules much lower in the
> memory.  Sure, it looks trivial when explained.
>
> And by the way, a trivial change that doesn't modify anything as
> fundamental as memory layout could be described in very similar terms.
> There is no way to see how profound changes are and whether they are
> relevant to the observed problems.

You are right, but this is nothing with ChangeLog itself. If one did not write 
a good commit message, the same thing happens with any kind of system.

> Detailed descriptions may be useful in many cases, but in my opinion,
> they should be secondary to high level descriptions.

Huh? You only think about the technical aspect. Note that ChangeLog is not 
only for technical purpose.

http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Legally-Significant.html#Legally-Significant

Okuji