[Building Sakai] Commit messages - a humble little plea

[Zhen Qian]

I agree with the plea and I will remember to include more context and change info into the commit log.

However, I think there is another exception to this, the security jiras. I think the succinct text like just the jira number is enough for those, since the log text is public.

Thanks,

- zhen

On Feb 14, 2012, at 5:51 PM, Steve Swinsburg wrote:

> 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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>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Aaron Zeckoski - Software Architect - http://tinyurl.com/azprofile _______________________________________________
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