Hi all, I'd like to propose that we agree on a common practise for commit messages. With git we will never lose any piece of history anymore, and EGit's blame support makes it easy to track down any line of code to the commit that has changed it.
A short explanation in a commit helps understanding the changes later on, and I also think it's a very good practice when you have worked on a fix for an hour or more, to take a short moment thinking, summarizing or explaining what you've done and why, before the change goes into the project's history. Moreover, good commit messages show that we care for our code base and not just dump stuff into the repository. The git commit message format explained in [1] seems to be the commonly accepted best practice and my suggestion is to adopt this and add it to our git guide [2]. I quoted the essence below, but check the article for the reasons. Another good read is the Linux kernel doc for submitting patches [3]. And there's an Eclipse Bug about commit messages [4]. -------- Capitalized, short (50 chars or less) summary More detailed explanatory text, if necessary. Wrap it to about 72 characters or so. In some contexts, the first line is treated as the subject of an email and the rest of the text as the body. The blank line separating the summary from the body is critical (unless you omit the body entirely); tools like rebase can get confused if you run the two together. Write your commit message in the present tense: "Fix bug" and not "Fixed bug." This convention matches up with commit messages generated by commands like git merge and git revert. Further paragraphs come after blank lines. - Bullet points are okay, too - Typically a hyphen or asterisk is used for the bullet, preceded by a single space, with blank lines in between, but conventions vary here - Use a hanging indent -------- Thoughts? Comments? Regards, Ralf [1] http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html [2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/RAP/Git [3] http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/v1.7.6.5/SubmittingPatches [4] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=380550 _______________________________________________ rap-dev mailing list [email protected] https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/rap-dev
