[Building Sakai] Commit messages - a humble little plea

[Aaron Zeckoski]

Definitely agree with this. And as much as possible, try to include
the intent/reason behind the commit rather than just repeating the
title which is probably something weird like "Tool X instructions are
confusing". A better message would be "Updated the tool X instructions
with more details about using a mouse in a web browser".

-AZ


On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Noah Botimer <botimer at umich.edu> wrote:
> Hello folks,
>
> A trend I've noticed is the shortening of commit messages, to the point of
> simply being a JIRA issue number. There is an up-side here: I don't remember
> the last real commit I saw without a JIRA ticket referenced. However, the
> downside is significant in assuming that this is sufficient.
>
> Take, for example, examining the history of a couple of branches to find
> when something was introduced. Common cases of this are cherry-picking a
> feature and porting a bug fix. I won't belabor all of the hassle, but
> mention a few points:
>
> First, each JIRA ticket must be called up individually to see what the
> intent was (set aside the topic of issue titles, which could be better
> generally). Second, there are often multiple commits against a ticket,
> sometimes interleaved with others, so the task often includes closely
> analyzing multiple diffs just to divine the intent. Third, there are
> occasionally errors in the reference or multiple issues combined in a
> commit, making it very difficult to track in either direction (from JIRA or
> Subversion).
>
>
> So, my simple request follows:
>
> Could we please try to include a brief summary of what action is being taken
> with each commit? If the change is non-trivial, please also include some
> details of what was introduced, changed, or removed.
>
>
> JIRA is great, but the one real truth is the source revision history. If you
> are committing something, please tell the historical record what you were
> doing.
>
> Although it has some Git specifics, this is a very nice
> guideline: http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html
>
> Thanks,
> -Noah
>
>
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-- 
Aaron Zeckoski - Software Architect - http://tinyurl.com/azprofile