[Scummvm-devel] Adopting a commit message convention

[peres]

Hi,

The difficult bit is not formatting a commit message the way you
propose, but coercing developers to do commits that are focused enough
so that a one-line summary makes sense.

Sometimes a changeset looks so tiny and not worthy of a commit itself,
sometimes it is just difficult to make a small commit because you are
changing something that has lots of side effects. I am speaking of
myself, but I hope somebody else admits their guilt :P

Git allows developers to commit to their own offline repository before
making their work public, so it might help enforce the good habit of
focused commits, at least for the first case above.
For this reason I would - tongue-in-cheekly - suggest that you lobby for
a change in VCS first, then for a change in commit message practice
rather than the other way round ;) 

peres (the insomniac)



On Thu, 2009-10-01 at 16:14 +0200, Ori Avtalion wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> If the project will one day move to a distributed VCS, maybe it should 
> adopt a popular commit message convention.
> 
> Many of the VCS systems and related tools distinguish between a one-line 
> summary of the commit, and a detailed description.
> 
> Tools such as gitk, gitweb and hgweb will only display the first line of 
> a commit in the regular log view. This will cause commits in the 
> (popular scummvm) form of
> 
>     - some fixes
>     - some more fixes
> 
> to be truncated to "- some fixes".
> 
> A developer using git-svn or a similar tool can miss part of the commit 
> message.
> 
> The standard git/hg/whatever commit message has a single line with a 
> short description, followed by an empty line and a detailed description.
> 
> An example can be found here: http://www.tpope.net/node/106
> 
> What do you think?
> 
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