Some time ago several people (most notably skv@) ranted about including a list of changes or a link to such list in the commit message for a port update.

I thought it was a great idea and started including a link to a CPAN's distribution Changes file in my commits some time ago.

What I did not like was that those links looked like this:

http://search.cpan.org/src/JESSE/Template-Declare-0.27/Changes

FreeBSD's commit messages are preserved in our repository and mail archives forever, for a suitable definition of "forever". On the other hand, CPAN authors are encouraged to clean up old and obsolete versions promptly.

Thus there is a discrepancy between expected time of life of the link in the commit message and the link contents.

While older CPAN distributions can still be found on BackPAN, it only provides links to tarballs and not individual files like Changes.

Luckily, it turns out that version-less links like

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Template-Declare/Changes

work just fine, redirecting to the most recent version of the file. This is acceptable, since Changes is expected to be a prepend-only file, so the information the commit message was trying to link to can (almost) always be found there.