Subject: Re: [bug#39275] [PATCH] gnu: vlc: add fluidsynth as input.

From: Danny Milosavljevic <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2020 12:30:27 +0100

Hi,

I'd prefer to change the subject to "gnu: vlc: Add MIDI support.".

> It would be good to put something in the commit message about why this
> is happening, as it's not obvious to me at least.

I disagree in general because I've seen before what that leads to:
Half the source code (the comments) end up in the commit messages instead.
Eventually (because of some merge or something) those get lost, or
(because of a new commit) those get hidden.
Now someone is going to overlook it.

So I'd put documentation into comments, except when it's ephemeral ("news").

Also, in the special case of Guix the reason why we add an input later is
"we forgot to add it earlier and it was optional to the package and thus the
package built" most of the time.  So the commit message would always be
"we forgot earlier".

In this case, vlc got MIDI support with vlc 0.9.0 (long ago) and nobody
noticed.

We could have the subject say "Add MIDI support" because it communicates more
clearly what this commit does for users.  And that's the news :)