Subject: Re: bug#75355: [PATCH 1/1] Improve comment cycling in log-edit

From: Jonas Bernoulli <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2025 20:54:42 +0100

> - I don't think Log Edit buffers ever contain commented lines or
>   scissors lines at present.

When you use "git commit" instead of "git commit -m "the message that
was prepared earlier", then Git inserts useful information into the
COMMIT_EDITMSG (or similar) file.

>   So I'm not sure why you included that
>   functionality.  Is it because you want to reuse this function in the
>   hypothetical simplified git-commit-mode?

Magit has been wrapping these functions for many years.  That's
perfectly fine for our needs and I am happy to continue to do so.  But
there was some interest in adding "git-commit.el" or parts thereof to
Emacs.  I figured this was the easiest and least controversial part to
integrate, so I started with that.

Even if this is merged as-is, that is not going to make it easier to
provide this functionality in Magit; it will have to continue to support
older Emacs releases for many years, so it will have to continue to keep
the wrapper code, but only for older releases.  That's going to make it
harder, not easier, for me.

I.e., I suggested this functionality because I though it would be
considered a clear improvement.  If that is not the case, that is okay
with me, and Magit will just keep doing what it has been doing.  If you
want to improve/change the proposed patch, please feel free to do so.
I hope that if/when you do, I can continue to wrap log-edit's functions
as I do now, but if I instead have to copy the implementations from an
older release and then modify that, I'll have to live with that.

> - I think some people might prefer not to have their half-written
>   comment saved.  What do you think about doing everything in entries in
>   log-edit-save-comment-hook, so that someone could customise that to
>   remove the default behaviour, if they wanted?  Or perhaps a simple
>   boolean defcustom to turn this new behaviour on and off.

So far no Magit user has asked me to add that, but if you want to
proactively add that in Emacs' implementation, please do.