Re: A little report on informal commit tag usage

> On 16 Jul 2019, at 16:33, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
> Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> writes:
>> As mentioned on different threads, "Discussion" is the only one we had
>> a strong agreement with. Could it be possible to consider things like
>> Author, Reported-by, Reviewed-by or Backpatch-through for example and
>> extend to that? The first three ones are useful for parsing the
>> commit logs. The fourth one is handy so as there is no need to look
>> at a full log tree with git log --graph or such, which is something I
>> do from time to time to guess down to where a fix has been applied (I
>> tend to avoid git_changelog).
>
> FWIW, I'm one of the people who prefer prose for this. The backpatching
> bit is a good example of why, because my log messages typically don't
> just say "backpatch to 9.6" but something about why that was the cutoff.

Wearing my $work-hat where I regularly perform interesting merges of postgres
releases as an upstream, these detailed commit messages are very valuable and
much appreciated. The wealth of (human readable) information stored in the
commit logs makes tracking postgres as an upstream quite a lot easier.

> I'm also skeptical of the argument that machine-parseable Reported-by
> and so forth are useful to anybody. Who'd use them, and for what?

The green gamification dot on people’s Github profiles might light up if the
machine readable format with email address was used (and the user has that
specific email connected to their Github account unless it’s a primary email).
Looking at commit 1c9bb02d8ec1d5b1b319e4fed70439a403c245b1 I can see that for
August 2018 Amit’s Github profile lists “Created 1 commit in 1 repository
postgres/postgres 1 commit”, which is likely from this commit message being
parsed in the mirror.

cheers ./daniel