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

[Hal Finkel]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Renato Golin" <renato.golin at linaro.org>
> To: "LLVM Dev" <llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu>, "Clang Dev" <cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu>
> Sent: Saturday, March 14, 2015 2:57:20 PM
> Subject: [cfe-dev] Bikeshedding commit message policy - Round 3 - Fight!
> 
> 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.

I used to use CSE:, but have now switched to using [CSE] because that seems to be the prevailing convention (and is somewhat more visually distinctive). I think it makes sense to codify that convention, but not to require them. Sometimes, there is nothing appropriate to use. Sometimes, the first or second word of the commit message is naturally the same as what the title tag would be, and so including the title tag seems redundant.

> 
> 
> 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.

I agree. I think the important part is that the name appear in an obvious context. That way, if I search my Inbox for the name, the relevant commit will appear, and it will be obvious why without reading a lot of text.

 -Hal

> 
> cheers,
> --renato
> 
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-- 
Hal Finkel
Assistant Computational Scientist
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory