[RFC] Re: short and long log messages

[Martin Pool]

On 18 May 2006, Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy at imag.fr> wrote:

> Whether you call it --line or --summary will not make your old history
> work with it. We already have --long, --short, and --line. I don't think
> having 4 log formatters by default would be a good thing for bzr's
> simplicity. If my proposal is adopted, then I think the current behavior
> of --line should no longer be available in the core bzr. Perhaps move it
> to bzrtools.
> 
> If you want to have a log formatter that don't use my proposal, you'll
> probably not follow the convention. Then, when _I_ run bzr log on _your_
> branches, I'll get crap output. In a distributed environment, you can't
> do without a global convention, and nobody will use it if the tool does
> not enforce it a little.
> 
> And I think we should take advantage of the pre-1.0 phase to set this
> kind of things.

I think making the first line be a single-sentence summary of <80
characters is a good idea and should be the standard practice.  It's
simpler than the arch approach, and commonly used (I think) by svn and
hg.

If this practice is adopted, then making log --line (and the
pending-merge display in status) show only the summary would make sense.
I wouldn't want to add another log format just for that; as Matthieu
says it would be too many. 

So overall I'm in favour of merging this and documenting the convention.

I know robert is fond of committing with -m and a single very long
string.  Perhaps we should somehow let him specify a separate summary on
the command line - most shells will anyhow let you continue a
quoted string over two lines.  You can make shell command lines
containing a newline in emacs but I'm not sure how in vi.

-- 
Martin