Commit message guidelines: Difference between revisions

Our commit messages for Mercurial get automatically distilled into GNU Changelog entries. The GNU coding standards have [http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Style-of-Change-Logs.html some guidelines] for how to write Changelogs, and since Octave is a GNU project, we try to produce Changelogs in this style. However, certain things have to be adapted because the style in there is primarily for C sources, and because we are producing them from Mercurial commit messages.

You can see how [[Mercurial]] will produce the Changelog-style output with the following command:

   hg log --style changelog

*Note that this command will print all changelogs to the screen, currently including all changelogs back to 2008 and approaching 200,0000 lines of text. You may use the followig command for a paged output:

 

  hg log --style changelog | less

 

*Alternatively, you may save the changlogs to a text file. This will permit viewing and searching in a text editor for use in preparing your own commit messages:

 

  hg log --style changelog >> octave_changelogs.log