[isabelle-dev] informative changelogs / typedef (open) unit

[Makarius]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2010, Brian Huffman wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Makarius <makarius at sketis.net> wrote:
>> For some reason, many people have started to sequeze everything in a single
>> line (frequent), or imitate the headline/body text format of other projects
>> with a completely different structure (rare).  The reason might be as
>> profane as the default web style of Mercurial, but at least on
>> http://isabelle.in.tum.de/repos/isabelle the display follows the usual
>> Isabelle format.
>
> It seems that viewing the "changelog" style preserves the line-breaks
> in commit messages.
>
> http://isabelle.in.tum.de/repos/isabelle/log/
>
> But the "shortlog" style doesn't; it concatenates everything onto one line.
>
> http://isabelle.in.tum.de/repos/isabelle/shortlog/
>
> If most other Isabelle developers are like me, they probably look at
> the "shortlog" style most of the time, and the style of commit
> messages imitates what they see on the web interface.
>
> If you want people to use linebreaks in their commit messages, it
> would probably be a good idea to actually display them in the
> "shortlog" view. Maybe you could add the "addbreaks" filter to the
> shortlog theme in hgweb?
>
> http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Theming

I did spend a lot of effort on the "theming" -- both 2 years ago when we 
started with Mercurial, and this year after some updates of Mercurial. 
The setup of "shortlog" follows the idea of a "short log", without 
linebreaks, while the longer formats do give the line breaks.

What I am trying to point out here again is that the maintenance of the 
system is a huge effort.  This can be simplified by following a few 
trivial rules.  The changelog history is one of the main assets, even more 
important than the quality of the tip version of the sources, because the 
history is fully persistent and cannot be modified later on.


 	Makarius