Hi Michael --

I don't have the experience or knowledge to weigh in on this in great detail
other than to say that I hear where you are coming from.  I will pass along
some helpful 'log' commands that Thomas sent me to get something
closer to what I was used to in the SVN world (though I think they still
get prefixed with the auto "merge pull request" first line for better or
worse.  I'm trying to recall -- with care can one not edit that line out of
the commit of the pull request?  i.e., is it simply a default that we could
change with minimal effort, or are we stuck with it?)

Anyway, here's Thomas's information.  He writes:

---

To get rid of the merges that are not to master, so you only see the
interesting pull request merges, use:

git log --merges --first-parent


And actually, this is the ³all pull request merges and all the original
svn trunk commits² view you are looking for:

git log --first-parent

And if you wanted to include files changed:


git log -m --first-parent --stat


Or for something similar to the svn files changed:

git log -m --first-parent --name-status

----

Michael, I think the discussion so far has been not to rebase/compress
the pull request before submitting it because the theory was that having
the full commit history that was done in preparing the patch was useful
information (similar to how, on SVN, when we did do things on branches,
we merged that history into trunk rather than just merging the final
snapshot).  The above aliases make this seem tractable to me from a
"surfing the history" perspective (with the caveat that I don't have a lot
of experience yet).

I think there's more discussion that should go on here, I just don't
have the experience yet to say much more than this myself (and am on
the road this week).

-Brad


________________________________________
From: Michael Ferguson [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2014 7:24 AM
To: chapel-developers
Subject: [Chapel-developers] merge messages

Hi -

If you run 'git log', you can see that most of these 'Merge' commit
messages don't have good line wrapping.That makes it very awkward
to use 'git log' to view history. See

http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html

to understand what is a good git commit message. (but I think we
probably already know that).

Also the commit messages like 'Merge pull request #bla from user/branch'
is not really useful in summary form (likewhen you do
  git log --pretty=short
for example)

I know that we've been trying to put an overall commit message
(like the old SVN commit message) into the Merge box on the
GitHub website in order to have a high-level view of the commit
history, in case the local git commits add a lot of noise.
An alternative approach would be to ask everybody to use
'git rebase -i' to make tidy history before making their commits
(I got used to doing that in order to make SVN-ready patches).
But, I acknowledge that rebasing can add some complexity...

Also, if you use the command line merge option described on
GitHub, you have the ability to change the subject
(which really should be something like the overall topic in my view)
and to make sure that you're line-wrapping right (by using
a usual text editor).

What I don't know  is if there isany reasonable way to
instruct the GitHub web pages to help us line-wrap these
messages better or to let us edit the subject line.
(If we can't change the Merge pull request ....' part, maybe
  at least we could be more careful about naming our branches,
  and then make the 2nd line always be a useful topic?)


I'd vote for:
  - basically tidy history beforedoing merge requests;
    each commit contains at least a good subject line
    for that change  and hopefully a description
  - merge log message always including the topic
    and including overall details and reviewer etc;
    and also including overall description if there are
    multiple commits in the merge or if the individual
    commit history is not adequate. (I don't know if
    doing that would prevent GitHub from linking
    merge commits to pull requests, or if it's possible
    to use this strategy at all on the web site).

The best online reference I've found for best practices  is:

http://codeinthehole.com/writing/pull-requests-and-other-good-practices-for-teams-using-github/

Thanks,

-michael

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