[list ettiqute] Improving list subjects regarding commits

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Sat, 2012-02-11 at 14:07 +0100, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> Am 10/02/12 23:04, schrieb Andrew Bartlett:
> > (trying again, I expressed my proposal very poorly initially)
> >
> > I've noticed that quite often in response to commit e-mails, that we (me
> > included) often simply reply to the commit message generated by git.
> > This message has a very generic title, '[SCM] Samba Shared Repository -
> > branch ...' that does not tell the reader very much about the commit.
> >
> > In contrast, we go to great effort to title our commits with short,
> > relevant titles and an even shorter prefix.
> >
> > As our replies often relate to only one commit in an autobuild, I would
> > like to encourage list members to to use commit titles as 'Subject:'
> > headers in follow up replies about commits posted to samba-technical.
> > (I and a few others try to do this).
> >
> > This would not only helps those reading the list in real time to know if
> > a mail is important to them right away, but is really helpful when
> > browsing the archives looking for a past discussion.
> >
> > As an additional proposal, and to help (at least) me to do this every
> > time, I wondered about using the mailman 'spam filter' functionality to
> > moderate messages that appear to be simple replies, eg matching exactly
> > '^Re: [SCM] Samba Shared Repository - branch'.
> >
> > What do others think?
> This seems like the wrong thing to fix to me. Why are the commit email 
> subjects so generic? Can't we fix those to be something like:
> 
> [SCM/Samba] e87d98c s3:vfs_gpfs:quieten an expectable warning message

Which of the often 20 or more commit lines would you use?  We could move
to one mail per commit, but that would be a larger amount of mail, and
miss the context that many of our commits have (in terms of commits
often being grouped and making most sense as a group). 

The closest idea I could come up with is a list of directories being
touched, and perhaps the hash of the top commit.  

I'm a big fan of using technology to solve social problems, but I also
didn't want to propose work for others in terms of improving the commit
hook script.

On the other hand, I do at least have an idea how to set up the spam
filter, and it follows what some of us have already been trying to do.

Andrew Bartlett
-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org