If you are familiar with SUSE packages, you probably know about .changes files, which is used for tracking changes. This file has a defined structure and is converted to common %changelog section in spec file during build of package. It worked well with many internal tools and everyone was happy in those old good times ;-).

Nowadays, we had a BuildService and osc, which has it owns commit log. I have aimed to keep the content of changes and osc changelog synchronized. But manual copying of it is not very reliable approach. So I wrote a small patch (and Adrian gives me a write access, so it is a r7099), which checks changes in it and add them to commit message as a template, so it will be easier to keep them synchronized.

How it works:

vi package.spec # do some changes
vc -m "some changes done" # vc is an internal command
osc commit

and osc will open an editor with content like this

  1 - some changes done
  2 --This line, and those below, will be ignored--
  3
  4 M    package.changes
  5
  6 Diff for working copy: .
  7 Index: package.changes
  8 ===================================================================
  9
 10 --- package.changes     (revision 19)
 11 +++ package.changes     (working copy)
 12 @@ -1,3 +1,8 @@
 13 +-------------------------------------------------------------------
 14 +Thu Apr 16 16:00:58 CEST 2009 - mvyskocil@suse.cz
 15 +
 16 +- some changes done
 17 +
 18  -------------------------------------------------------------------
 19  Thu Apr 16 15:37:52 CEST 2009 - mvyskocil@suse.cz

Now you can type :w (save) for commit, or :q! (quit without saving) for abort. The behavior of -m argument is unchanged.