Re: Template for commit messages

From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
To: "Joshua D(dot) Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
Cc: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, Tomas Vondra <tomas(dot)vondra(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, "pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org" <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Template for commit messages
Date: 2016-01-29 23:05:40
Message-ID: 20160129230539.GA783114@alvherre.pgsql
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Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> I think the best question to ask is:
>
> "What is the problem we are trying to solve?"

The problem is alluring more patch reviewers, beta testers and bug
reporters. One of the offers is to credit them (I'm not exactly clear
on what is the group to benefit from this, but the phrasing used in the
meeting was "contributors to the release") by having a section somewhere
in the release notes with a list of their names. This proposal is
different from the previous proposal because their names wouldn't appear
next to each feature.

So the problem, of course, is collating that list of names, and the
point of having a commit template is to have a single, complete source
of truth from where to extract the info.

Personally I don't see value in having the commit message follow a
machine-parseable format; like if you say "Backpatch to" instead of
"Backpatch-through:" makes your commit message wrong. I think what was
being proposed is to have committers ensure that the commit messages
always carried the necessary info (which, as far as I know, they do.)

--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services

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