[list ettiqute] Improving list subjects regarding commits

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Sun, 2012-02-12 at 11:37 +1100, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> 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.

Jelmer,

Do you propose to make some change to our commit script, or can you at
least describe what approach you think should be taken for our
multiple-commit pushes?

Otherwise, can we go ahead with my proposal?

Thanks,

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