As discussed internally during our switch to Mercurial, we should have a stated policy on how to write log messages when committing our work to the repositories.
I've always found the Subversion dev team's guidelines on log messages to be a very useful example. I would like to submit to the rest of the devs the following as a template for what our policy should be like:
http://subversion.tigris.org/hacking.html#log-messages
Mercurial log listings emphasize the first log line of every changeset as a summary of the changes, as does the abovementioned guideline. I'd say this is the single most important thing to get right. You will not need to look far back in the NAV changelog to see some really bad examples of log messages, which were common among some of the earlier developers (The guilty shall remain anonymous. Until you actually inspect the logs).
I'd like comments from current devs on the abovementioned guidelines. Should we blatantly copy them and replace all mention of Subversion with NAV, or should we make some appropriate changes?