Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik <ruskie AT codemages.net>]

:2009-10-08T16:06:Eric Sandall:

> > Has anyone thought anymore of having HISTORY auto-generated from `git
> > commit`? It'd be nice to not have to enter the information twice. ;)
> > That means our commit messages would have to be more verbose than they
> > currently our. ;)
> > 
> > ----
> > Brief one-liner
> > 
> > Normal HISTORY entry
> > ----
> > 
> > e.g.
> > ----
> > ekiga: Updated to 3.0
> > 
> > DETAILS: Updated to 3.0
> > ----
> > 
> > Then `git commit` would add all but the newline to HISTORY. I suppose we
> > should move this to SM-Discuss? :)
> 
> Justin brought up an idea in
> https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/sm-discuss/2009-October/019787.html:
> I think that the auto-generated commit entries (I assume you mean
> specifically the commit messages) would only be appropriate for routine
> commits done in the grimoire, such as simple spell updates or creations.
> There would need to be an easy way to override that function though for
> non-routine cases.
> 
> Depending on one's editor, this could be accomplished relatively easily.
> However, a better solution would be to implement this as a git hook
> (PREPARE-COMMIT-MSG, so that the editor is still brought up and the
> template can easily be modified?) within the grimoire git repository,
> which could be tracked by the repository and thus all clones of the main
> repository would pull it in.

I still don't see the benefit in this since it still requires the guru
to write it out on his own(not to mention it still doesn't solve "It'd
be nice to not have to enter the information twice" since you generally
don't, commit messages tend to be one liners while HISTORY entries tend
to be verbose). Also I consider this a bad idea as eventually this
would degenerate into just:
date guru <email>
\t * Modified spell to support foobarf and version update

Instead of a proper detailed HISTORY entry we have now.

I actually find it a good idea to have the detail in HISTORY we have
now. On multiple levels at that.
a) it makes me think over what was changed and consider if there is
   anything wrong
b) it makes it easy to trace when something happened without needing to
   sift through diffs/commit logs etc...
c) automation - I tend to quite often do simple things like
   for spell in changed-spells ; do
     git commit -m "$spell: version update to $version" $spell
   done
   This way only the commit msg changes and I don't have to worry about
   all the minor details that can be done in DETAILS at such times, old
   variables removed, website update, description update not to mention
   if I there's also DEPENDS changes due to the update and BUILD etc...
   This is currently easy but after that it wouldn't be since you would
   need to have a highly specific commit msg for each spell

If this were to be implemented I think it would need to be optional.

Just my 0.02€
-- 
Andraž ruskie Levstik
Source Mage GNU/Linux Games/Xorg grimoire guru
Re-Alpine Coordinator http://sourceforge.net/projects/re-alpine/
Geek/Hacker/Tinker

Show them the ropes and soon they've used that rope to build a bridge to 
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