Re: Template for commit messages

On 01/02/16 13:36, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2016-01-28 06:03:02 -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> Reported-by:
>> Bug:
>> Author:
>> Reviewed-by:
>> Tested-by:
>> Backpatch-through:
>
> I personally, and I realize that I'm likely alone on that, would really
> like to see references to relevant threads. A year after a commit or
> such it often starts to get hard to know which threads a commit was
> about. Often it's easy enough if it's about a single feature, but
> bugfixes often originate in threads that have no directly corresponding
> thread. And often the commit happens a while after there's been activity
> in a thread. I spent days searching what thread "per discussion" in
> commit messages refers to.

+1. I also quite often look at a commit message, and then hunt the "per
discussion". A message-id would save some time there. I've seen you add
annotations like that to your commits, which is nice. I'll start doing
that myself. You've used the "Discussion: <message-id>" format for that,
so I'll go with that too. (Even if the message-id is given in free-form
in the paragraphs, that's helpful, but might as well use a fixed form.)

And that's a proposal that's not "we must all do it or it's useless". If
half of commit messages include that, then hunting the "per discussion"
for those commits becomes easier, and the rest are the same as now.

- Heikki