Mark McLoughlin wrote:
What do you think of coreutils' logs? It's generated and still ChangeLog-conforming, yet with an added one-line summary and sometimes (for larger changes) more prose:
Looking at the git commits e.g.
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commit;h=24c727d3
it doesn't duplicate date/author and has a good first line summary, so it's pretty good.
The one question I'd have is whether listing of per-file changes has any value. IMHO, it tends to restrict the explanation people give about about their commits. Looking at projects that don't do this, I think you tend to get much more background on why the change is being made, not just what changed.
IMHO it's more about habit than which format you use. I find the ChangeLog discipline is worthwhile, because it forces me to go back through the patch and write something for each changed file. Besides, if you use a tool like vc-chlog to write the template for you (http://www.gnu.org/software/vc-dwim/) it removes the pain of enumerating affected files and function names. Also, the companion, vc-dwim, has saved me regularly by telling me when a file I'm about to commit has unsaved changes -- it detects editor temporary files. It's caught emacs buffers with changes that weren't saved at least 2 or 3 times in the last week or so. coreutils is in a mode for which one-liners are often enough, but I do admit that the log messages are sometimes too light on prose.