Please use conventional commit messages (Re: git: 2a9b7ca2a362)

[Bernhard Fröhlich]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 6:10 AM Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 12:44:24PM +0000, Rene Ladan wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 11:53:46AM +0000, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
> > > On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 12:36:39PM +0200, Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> > > > On Wednesday, 28 April 2021 12:17:13 CEST Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
> > > > > commit 2a9b7ca2a3620249bfad050ac3eee6d859926213
> > > > > ...
> > > > >
> > > > >     Update `www/web2ldap' to version 1.5.117.
> > > >
> > > > Please use conventional commit messages, [...]
>
> Forgot to mention: this "conventional" format of yours adds really a lot
> of noise to the "git log ." output which in turn makes history harder to
> study and navigate around.  Extra blank lines pessimize it even further.
>
> > > I think it is conventional enough.  I'd prefer it even better without
> > > the embedded port name, but I guess I can buy the reasoning why people
> > > want to see it there.  As for its position, I find "foo/bar: blah"
> > > inconvenient, unnatural, and hard to read.
> >
> > This just makes scanning commit mails harder.
>
> The problem here is very poor git's default commit email template, and
> duplicating metainformation that can be automatically inferred from the
> commit is conceptually wrong.
>
> Subject line should contain commit identifier, branch name, and a list
> of files, directories, or the top directory of the commit.  Subversion
> did this right, FWIW.  Take a look at old commit logs in comparison and
> notice how cleaner and better they were.
>
> Li-Wen told me that they are working on improving email template (as it
> has other deficiencies as well), so let's hope this issue would be fixed
> at the proper level and people won't have to write idiotic subject-like
> lines in their commit logs.

I know your feelings about git and yeah it might not be the best tool one
could possible think of but let's be positive and make the best out of it.
There might be some room for improvements, yeah I would also like to see
the commit message templates to be improved and a few nits here and there
but writing a good commit message will ALWAYS be necessary so let's
focus on that for the moment.

If my mailbox in the morning contains 200 messages and I just want to scan
them if something interesting happened then I don't read each and every
subject in full but I just want to see if my eye finds a port that I care about
or stuff that I find interesting. It's about the same situation why newspapers
have headlines. It tries to use keywords to get your attention.

In git the "short logs" are very compact:
https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/log/?ofs=50

whereas in svn traditionally you always get the full newspaper:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/?view=log

A common format that everyone uses is immensely useful in this case
because it allows scanning many commits quite fast. Many people have
used that format also before the git conversion already and it has proven to
be useful for many of us.

I know that I have no right to expect anything from other peoples commit
messages but you just might not have this usecase so probably it helps
you understand other people better if you know their usecases. And maybe
you also realize that it sometimes helps a community as a whole to stick
to some common tools and formats after everyone has expressed why a
new tool/format is imperfect.

-- 
Bernhard Fröhlich
http://www.bluelife.at/