I too find the inclusion of what amounts to the ChangeLog diffs in any
commit-log message to be increasingly annoying, redunant, and unnecessary.

If the update is to fix a serious bug, especially one reported in a
NetBSD PR, or even just to close a PR that supplied an update, then that
should be mentioned.  But that's all that's really necessary.  The rest
of the details are always available either on the package's HOMEPAGE, or
in the result of "make extract", or both.  I can wait until I get the
new pkgsrc module to find these things out -- the commit message need
only alert me to the fact that I should look deeper at some point.

_Maybe_ if the new entries from a proper GNU "NEWS" file are included in
the commit then that's OK.  Not every package has a proper NEWS file
or similar though, and sometimes there's still *way* too much detail....

Just the highlights, PLEASE!

Note too that it's the commits to the doc/pkg-CHANGES file that many of
us (well me, at least! ;-) find most useful (or rather which we pay the
most attention to, be they useful or not! :-).

Commit messages, especially those to doc/pkg-CHANGES, that say only
"update of www/links" are similarly annoying because of their lack of
useful information (that's obviously a manufactured example, BTW! ;-).
They should say "update of www/links to 0.96" (as the recent one for
this particular package more or less did actually say).

One more related thing that would be very very very helpful to those of
us who track and _use_ pkgsrc-current would be if the commit messages to
doc/pkg-CHANGES were to always include the text of the COMMENT macro
when a new package is added.  This helps us keep track of new packages
that are of particular interest and allows us to safely ignore the rest.

Here's an example of an almost perfect proper and useful commit to
doc/pkg-CHANGES:

	Module Name:	doc
	Committed By:	zuntum
	Date:		Tue Jul 10 09:55:37 UTC 2001
	
	Modified Files:
		doc: pkg-CHANGES
	
	Log Message:
	Note SDL_net-1.2.0 addition
	
	This is a small sample cross-platform networking library

That tells me almost everyting that I need to know and nothing more.
The only thing missing is the package category.....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>