On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 09:56:27AM +0200, Schanzenbach, Martin wrote: > Hi, > > I just finished cleaning up the neglected ChangeLog. We all (mostly me and > grothoff) gravely neglected > to update the file (no change since 0.12.1!) and it was quite a pain to go > through the git logs this > time. > > In order to prevent this or at least make this easier in the future, it would > be great if we could from now on > settle on the following convention regarding commit messages: > > A. Commit messages prefixed with "- " > Whenever you commit a simple bugfix, indentation fix or followup commit > (forgot file etc) please > add a "- " to your commit message. > > Example: > > "- forgot to actually add file" > or > "- indentation" > > B. Any other commit > Please formulate your commit message in a way that makes it understandable > what component was changed, > why it was changed and how. Possibly with an issue number if applicable: > > Example: > > "GNS: Added new record type BB. Fixes #4223" > or > "Buildsystem: Fixed build breaking with gcc-10"
Yes, let's please establish something like that. I've tried my best myself, but that's like 0.000001% of GNUnet commits -- and of course, as was pointed out in a previous debate on that, GNUnet is not the Linux kernel and experimentation becomes very slow if you have to write a novel on every single step you do... Another aspect is me struggling with reviewing things for GNUnet because often times I can see what a commit does but I have no idea what it was **supposed to do**, due to lacking commit descriptions. Also knowing whether a commit was meant to be purely cosmetic is nice when reviewing. So maybe we can be a bit more differentiated with our to be established language of symbols: Let's use '- ' prefix for small fixes or follow-up commits, just like you suggested above. Let's use '# ' prefix for purely cosmetic changes (ie. not functional changegs intended). Cheers Daniel > > I added a new script in contrib/scripts/changelog_delta.sh > which will allow us to more or less automatically generate ChangeLog entries > from git logs by only including commits in the format "B" starting from the > last > commit referenced in the existing ChangeLog. > > We should probably at some point add a section to the handbook where we can > detail commit message information. > > Thanks and BR
