Does not set or honour commit message

[Aaron Bentley]

Launchpad permits setting a commit message, to be used when committing the code. lbox does not provide a way to set this message, and it does not honour the setting when committing the code.

[Gustavo Niemeyer (niemeyer)]

That's because it uses the description of the merge proposal, and it's not clear what's the advantage of using two different descriptions for the same merge proposal, when most projects do a pretty poor job on using even one of them.

Can someone provide more detials of what's the use case, and how are *both* fields used at once?

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

For honouring a commit message that the user has set, the rationale is straightforward-- the user wanted this commit message to be used, so the tool should use it.

For setting the commit message, there are two reasons:
Many projects have different conventions for commit messages and merge proposal descriptions. The commit messages tend to be short summaries, while the merge proposal descriptions are long, nuanced descriptions that are addressed to a reviewer and are intended to understood in the context of the diff. Examples include Bazaar and Launchpad.

Pragmatically, tools such as Tarmac expect this value to be set, and so not setting it makes it harder for users of those tools to land their changes.