numerous problems with "Create new revision"

what i did

i've got a fresh copy of drupal from the cvs head (as of 2006-03-08, 3am GMT-800) running on a test site. i've been playing with node revision behavior (trying, unsuccessfully, to reproduce the Edit node as new revision gives mysql error bug), and i stumbled upon what appear to be a number of problems with the "Create new revision" publishing option.

what i saw

• i went to admin/settings/content-types/page and selected the "Create new revision" checkbox, and saved. once i went to node/add/page, the initial version of the node has the "Create new revision" box checked, and a "Log message" textarea. i made a test page, put in a log message, and hit save. however, when i then try to edit the node, the "Create new revision" checkbox is now unset, yet the "Log message" area is still there.
• if i manually select the "Create new revision" box while editing the node, i get a new revision created, and a revisions tab appears (including the previous value of the "Log message" field as the old revision, and the current value as the new revision. this much is working. however, again, when i go to edit the page, the "Create new revision" checkbox is not checked. if i make further changes (e.g. to the Log message field and/or the node body), that shows up as the current revision, not as a new revision.

what i'd expect

• once you select the site-wide "create new revision" box, that should be remembered for any nodes of that type, even beyond the first revision.
• the "Log message" textarea should always appear if you're creating a new revision, and should never appear if you're not.

those items match 4.6 behavior, as best as i can tell. i think 4.7 should at least do what 4.6 is doing.

furthermore, i think these would be improvements:

• even if the site-wide setting isn't set, once you select the "create new revision" box for a particular node, that should be remembered and future edits should have "create new revision" selected already. if you want to make a simple change that you don't want to track, you can go out of your way to uncheck the box, but i think once you say you want to save revisions of a node, that should be the default behavior for all edits of that node.
• it's slightly confusing that the first revision is considered a special case and you don't get a revisions tab unless there are multiple revisions. in 4.6 the revisions tab only showed you "older revisions", whereas in 4.7, this tab shows the current revision (and the log messages, nice!). if 4.7 is going to consider the 1st revision a valid revision, why not have the tab? "because the tab doesn't let you do anything unless there are N revisions" you might reply. however, i'd argue the existance of the tab, even on the first revision, is a nice reassurance to the user that drupal really is planning to keep track of revisions for you, even if there are no older revisions to view or revert to just yet.

it's too late for me to wrap my head around this problem and submit a patch. i just wanted to create an issue before i forgot about it. ;) i tried to search the existing issue queue but didn't see anything about this. apologies if this is duplicate. i'm setting the status to "critical" because it appears that the site-wide setting isn't doing what it's supposed to, 4.7 is a regression from 4.6 in terms of node revision behavior, and i think that's going to look bad for drupal, especially folks trying to upgrade who are used to the old behavior. apologies if those aren't good enough reasons for this to be "critical". ;) obviously, my "improvements" ideas aren't part of the "critical bug" i have in mind, they're just related from a UI perspective, and i thought i should provide a little more context.

thanks,
-derek