You hardly ever look at check-in comments in raw CVS. Later on, I added things like [CVSTrac][1] which made the comments visible, and so I started writing better check-in comments. But back in 2000, the check-in comment prompt was just an annoyance, and so I filled it in with a smiley. See the [History of Fossil][2] for more background information. [1]: http://cvstrac.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.html [2]: https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/history.md