Feature request: modify commit message in public repo

Eli Zaretskii eliz at gnu.org
Fri Jan 1 20:56:59 GMT 2010


A recent discussion on the Emacs development list revealed that Bazaar
does not support the equivalent of "cvs admin -mREV:MESSAGE".  See

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-01/msg00001.html

This facility is needed to fix typos and other clerical mistakes in
commit messages.  In my experience, it is not used frequently, but
when it is needed, not having it is an annoyance: you could, for
example, make some embarrassing mistake or munge the name of the
author, or even omit the name(s) of contributors, which will then look
like plagiarism.

I know about "bzr uncommit", but that is only a solution for local
branches, not for public remote ones.

In the above discussion, people explained that the commit message is
considered part of the commit and is hashed together with it, so it is
impossible to modify it without rewriting the revision generated by
the commit.  However, rewriting the revision is not required.  I don't
think it would matter if modification of the commit message
constituted another revision.  What matters is that "bzr log" and
other similar facilities would show the modified message, at least by
default.  (If someone wants to dig deeper and will then see that the
message was modified from something else, that is okay, too.)

Would it be possible to add such a facility in a future version of
Bazaar?  Or maybe it already exists, and I just don't know?

TIA



More information about the bazaar mailing list