[Koha-devel] Bug 18936 - Circulation Rules Ratification

[Julian Maurice]

I can easily understand why the commit messages were not revised, and I 
certainly wouldn't want to be the person that delay such an important 
patchset because of the commit messages.

The problem with commit messages is that they cannot be changed/improved 
after the commits have been pushed. And as you said, follow-ups often 
pollute the history.

Also, it may be easier to enforce a rule like "you have to write one 
line in ChangeLog" than a rule like "you have to write a good commit 
message" because good and bad are really subjective. And if the line in 
ChangeLog is not good enough, it can still be improved later, after the 
commits are pushed.

Maybe we can continue this discussion on bug 22890, as Jonathan suggested

Le 05/02/2020 à 09:47, Joonas Kylmälä a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> if you are still interested to know the why part, it is explained in the
> wiki:
> <https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Circulation_Rules_Interface_and_Backend_Revamp_RFC>.
> I definitely agree it should have been in the commits too but I got
> maybe too lax as a QA person since we had so many regressions fixed
> already (took around 2 weeks to do the QA) the earliest patches were
> send and revised already 2.5 years ago so this has been a long process
> but I guess not a real excuse either.
> 
> As for the developer changelog, I'm fine with reading just the git
> history but for this to work ideally I still think the follow-ups from
> the patch author itself are bad and we need to be strict about enforcing
> good commit messages!
> 
> On 04/02/2020 18:58, Julian Maurice wrote:
>> Thanks for the clarification, but my comment was more about "how people
>> could find this information" rather than "give me this information".
>> Currently it's not in the bug, not in commit messages, not in any kind
>> of documentation.
>>
>> During the last developer irc meeting it was decided to reinforce good
>> commit message guideline, and I think that could have been useful here.
>> Specifically the "why" part is missing and the "what" part could have
>> been more verbose.
>>
>> Apart from this particular bug, I think everyone would benefit from a
>> "developer changelog" where all this kind of changes (database renames,
>> subroutines removals, ...) would be written.
>>
>> Just my 2 cents...
>>
>> PS: Not everyone has time to look at all the bugs discussed on the
>> mailing list. Please don't make me feel guilty about it :)

-- 
Julian Maurice
BibLibre