[Building Sakai] Commit messages - a humble little plea

[Steve Swinsburg]

I agree with this, trunk commits should include info about what the commit is doing. However there is one exception, branch merging. 

These have historically been of the form:

SAK-123 merge trunk r12345

If it merges cleanly, otherwise it would be:

SAK-123 manually merge trunk r12345 (and any other notes required).

You can then reference the original trunk commit and jira.

cheers,
Steve


On 15/02/2012, at 4:25 AM, DAVID ROLDAN MARTINEZ wrote:

> 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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> 
> 
> --
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