Re: bugs and bug tracking

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 2:33 PM, Nathan Wagner <nw+pg(at)hydaspes(dot)if(dot)org> wrote:
> Two, I think any attempt to tell the developers and committers that they
> need to change their workflow to adapt to some system is bound to fail,
> so, I have asked, just what changed would you all be willing to actually
> *do*? Tom Lane is pretty good at noting a bug number in his commit
> messages, for example. Would he be willing to modify that slightly to
> make it easier to machine parse? Would you be willing to add a bug
> number to your commit messages? I'm not asking for guarantees.
> Actually I'm not really asking for anything, I'm just trying to figure
> out what the parameters of a solution might be. If the answer to that
> is "no, I'm not willing to change anything at all", that's fine, it just
> colors what might be done and how much automation I or someone else
> might be able to write.

I'd personally be willing to put machine-parseable metadata into my
commit messages provided that:

1. I'm not the only one doing it - i.e. at least 3 or 4
moderately-frequent committers are all doing it consistently and all
using the same format. If Tom buys into it, that's a big plus.

2. Adding the necessary metadata to a commit can be reasonably
expected to take no more than 2 minutes in typical cases (preferably
less).

3. Adding the metadata doesn't cause lines > 70 characters. I am not
a fan of the "Discussion: Message-ID-Here" format which some
committers have begun using, sometimes with just the message ID and
sometimes with the full URL, because anything which causes horizontal
scrolling makes me sad.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company