[Building Sakai] Commit messages - a humble little plea

[DAVID ROLDAN MARTINEZ]

I absolutely agree. In fact, my commit messages are so brief (just the ticket number) because I thought that was the standard way of doing this. :D

-----Mensaje original-----
De: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] En nombre de Aaron Zeckoski
Enviado el: martes, 14 de febrero de 2012 18:14
Para: Noah Botimer
CC: sakai-dev
Asunto: Re: [Building Sakai] Commit messages - a humble little plea

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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