[Koha-devel] git commit messages

[Colin Campbell]

Hi,
  can I humbly suggest that we should take a couple of secs to make the
commit messages for submitted patches a bit more useful. When looking at
the history of the code its useful if the summary gives a brief
indication of what has been changed or added by the commit. Good
summaries can save a lot of frustrated time wasting when trying to track
down where a change has been introduced.
Although we flag up the bugzilla bug in the summary, just echoing the
bug summary is nearly always counter-productive. The commit should
indicate the change introduced not the bug that prompted it. Once the
patch is applied the original bug is "background reading" not the main
event. It is also misleading if the commit summary says "X is broken"
then when that is extracted into the release notes or the gitlog it
looks like the commit introduces the breakage of x not vice-versa. It is
surely better to have the commit say something along the lines of
"Fix broken behaviour in X", which makes it sound a bit more like the
desirable feature it no doubt is.

A long standing succinct post on commit messages is

http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html

Colin
(Author of some of the world's worst commit messages)

-- 
Colin Campbell
Chief Software Engineer,
PTFS Europe Limited
Content Management and Library Solutions
+44 (0) 800 756 6803 (phone)
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colin.campbell at ptfs-europe.com
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