[RFC] Amend commit messages

[Gilles Moris]

On Wednesday 23 February 2011 12:51:53 pm Laurens Holst wrote:
> I don’t think it’s necessary, or desirable.
>
> It doesn’t happen that often, and when it does, usually you still have
> the opportunity to do hg rollback or even to edit it with MQ or histedit
> as you said.
>
> If you’ve pushed out the changes already, then zut, so be it. Honestly,
> it’s really not a big deal to have a less-than-perfect commit message.
> Can’t change commit messages at all with SVN once you’ve committed, I
> think with the existing possibilities Mercurial is already a lot more
> powerful than that.

OK. I already answered Jason in this area so I will not comment much more.
I can just add that this could be another differentiator for Mercurial to have 
this possibility that others don't have.
Note that this is possible with the "good old CVS": "cvs admin -m". OK, CVS 
might not be a model to persue though.

>
> Taking it further seems to me like taking it too far, and hurting the
> immutable history principle. In fact, the ability to edit history
> already leads me to the tendency spend a lot of time on tidying it up
> that I really shouldn’t be spending, and is also actually pretty
> dangerous, you can lose your changes with relative ease. (Hopefully with
> the dead branches functionality it’ll be less dangerous.)

I just want to comment that the extension does not alter the history 
immutability in any way. Just strip out the hgmessage branch with "hg 
clone -r" and you will restore your pristine history with all their original 
typos. Deactivating the extension does the same temporarily.
In that way, this is much less invasive than histedit or MQ that will alter 
the SHA1 hash.

Regards.
Gilles.