[Users] Einstein Toolkit Meeting Minutes

[Erik Schnetter]

I don't believe in automated mechanisms.

Carpet has been using this policy for a long time. Many people use it without being told. Others don't -- they either don't care, or they can't be bothered because they have other things in mind when creating a commit, or they simply don't believe in reading commit messages.

And then, there is the more important issue of knowing how to write a good commit message. Some people document their changes in commit messages (because they didn't write comments), others simply describe the changes in detail (as opposed to giving a high-level overview). Some use commit messages as forum to announce new features, or to explain how to use a new feature.

If we truly want to change this, then we should
- have a discussion on how we would like commit message to read
- write this up on a brief, simple wiki page
- refuse patches if the commit message is far below our standards (e.g. is offensive, or "forgets" to mention a major issue)

To make this work, we need patches that are submitted together with submit messages. That is, people would need to publish their commits (e.g. in a Bitbucket clone), and a maintainer pulls them.

-erik

On Jul 17, 2014, at 15:31 , Bruno Coutinho Mundim <bcmsma at astro.rit.edu> wrote:

> On 07/17/2014 04:35 PM, Barry Wardell wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Frank Loeffler <knarf at cct.lsu.edu> wrote:
>> 
>>> We could provide one. We cannot enforce people installing it.
>>> 
>>>> and on top of that set up the server to reject unformatted messages?
>>> 
>>> That is probably the better option. Although I would only see it as help
>>> to "not forget about it", not an enforcement really (although
>>> technically it is the same). We cannot disallow anything else than thorn
>>> names before the ":" (we might have commit touching multiple thorns), so
>>> we cannot technically prevent something like "somewhere: changed
>>> something". But we don't need to technically enforce everything anyway.
>> 
>> 
>> This is a good point. While it seems like a good general guideline to have
>> the thorn name as a prefix in any commit message, I'm not convinced it is a
>> good idea to strictly enforce it. For example, what about commits that
>> modify several thorns at once?
>> 
> 
> Then we could prefix with "Arrangement:". In any case I don't have
> strong feelings about it. It was just a suggestion to make the commit
> messages neater and motivate people to apply localized, atomic commits
> instead.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bruno.
> 
>> Carpet has a policy like this; in general commit messages are prefixed by
>> the thorn name, but occasionally there will be a message which changes many
>> thorns at once and doesn't adhere to this convention.
>> 
> 
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-- 
Erik Schnetter <schnetter at cct.lsu.edu>
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/eschnetter/

My email is as private as my paper mail. I therefore support encrypting
and signing email messages. Get my PGP key from http://pgp.mit.edu/.

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