What's missing from our changelogs

What's missing from our changelogs

Or to put it another way: if someone takes a complicated change, carefully splits it into small independent steps, and leaves the explanation on the first commit--then they get dinged for writing inadequate commit messages?

Often the reason Al's patches lack changelog bodies is because he does the hard work of figuring out how to get from point A to point B in trivial self-explanatory steps--something he deserves credit for. (What *does* get lost, I think, is motivation: for example, motivation for the readdir api change ("dealing with ->f_pos races in ->readdir() instances for good") is only in the cover letter, as far as I can tell, not in any changelog or code comment (but I may have missed it, or maybe it's there in changes to problematic filesystems, I didn't check).)

In any case, I don't think we can draw useful conclusions from simple summaries of the commit statistics--careful examination of representative cases would seem more instructive.