[Koha-devel] git commit messages

[Barton Chittenden]

Mea Culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

Thanks for the link, Colin. There are a couple of related issues that I had
noticed along the way:

1) Convention (and possibly some koha programming standard) says that the
bug number be included in the summary line of the commit message. Somewhere
along the line, I assumed that this was an automated thing, so I left them
off to avoid duplication :-/ (I'm in the process of fixing those). If we
did want to automate this, where would we put it in the process?

2) Knowing which branches a patch has been pushed to is a pain-point for
those of us supporting Koha [I know that this is a bit off topic, because
this is *not* information that would be stored in the commit message, but
bear with me...]. Typically, QA will announce that a patch has been pushed
to master, and then the release maintainers for the supported releases will
apply the patch to the point releases of the supported Koha version, if
applicable. This can cause issues for support because we don't necessarily
know what version master was at when the bug was pushed. You can get some
sense of this from the date the bug was pushed, and look up release dates,
but that's not a straightforward process by any means. I'm not a QA guy,
but I assume that we have some release management tool... could we automate
the process so that it posted the Koha version number to bugzilla when a
bug is pushed to master?

Thanks,

--Barton

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 5:47 AM, Jonathan Druart <
jonathan.druart at bugs.koha-community.org> wrote:

> I plead guilty :)
> I already try to follow these instructions but I tend to forget!
>
> Do you have some recent examples?
>
> Cheers,
> Jonathan
>
> 2015-09-23 9:29 GMT+01:00 Colin Campbell <colin.campbell at ptfs-europe.com>:
> > 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)
> > +44 (0) 7759 633626  (mobile)
> > colin.campbell at ptfs-europe.com
> > skype: colin_campbell2
> >
> > http://www.ptfs-europe.com
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