[cfe-dev] Bikeshedding commit message policy - Round 3 - Fight!

[Renato Golin]

Folks,

On review http://reviews.llvm.org/D8197, we're basically down to two
bikeshedding issues:

1. Title tags

Some people use "[CSE] Change blah", others use "CSE: Change blah". I
hadn't put anything regarding tags because not everyone use it and
when they do, it's slightly different. I personally don't think it's a
reason to argue about, so I'm in favour of removing the comment
altogether and let people do what they feel is best for their own
commits.

Anyone feel strongly about this? I vote for removing the paragraph and
let people realise they can do that by looking at the past commit
messages.


2. Attribution

The dev policy (http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#attribution-of-changes)
gives an example of how to do it: “patch contributed by J. Random
Hacker!”. I personally took that as a guideline, not a rule, and never
really used the exclamation mark, nor I say "contributed", and that
seems what most people do, too. Since having them differently on both
places will bring people to bike shed, I think we need to stick to
one, or be explicitly vague about it.

People have scripts that rely on that, and since it seems to be
working, I'm pretty sure it *doesn't* rely on the word "contributed"
not it relies on the exclamation mark. I'm strongly in favour of not
requiring any of it.

Anyone feels that strongly about "contributed" or the exclamation mark?

I see three solutions here:

1. We stand by that exact phrase, since it's "kosher". I'm against it.

2. We just say that a line that contains the words "patch", "by",
"<name><punctuation>" will be parsed by attribution. I'm against it,
as this will start another bike shed on the exact regular expression
to use. Not to mention this will be an internationalisation and
abbreviation hell.

3. We say "Patch by Foo Bar." and let people be reasonably creative. I
vote for this one.

cheers,
--renato