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@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@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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