Re: Experimental repositories on git.gnome.org

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 11:53 -0800, Sandy Armstrong wrote:

> > Stripping the header line and leading whitespace is pretty clearly a
> > good thing (though it can occasionally lose author information when it
> > is different from the committer). Stripping the file names is a bit more
> > controversial.
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not really sure I understand why 
> file name references are being removed.  I guess you have a shorter 
> message, but you have basically no context when you run `git log` to see 
> what's been going on.  The example you give above is pretty meaningless 
> to me, and I'm pretty sure it would be hard to follow a similar message 
> in modules I maintain or contribute to.
> 
> Is this the common convention in projects using git?  If so, I really 
> don't understand what commit message format has to do with choice of 
> source control [1]...

There are really two separate points to the stripping process.

 1) What makes a good ChangeLog message is a bit verbose for a commit
    message.... there's no point in listing the files 

 2) To provide a good Subject for the commit

Of these, the second is a lot more important.

git commit messages aren't just arbitrary - they have a structure as

 <single line subject>
 
 <multiline body>

This is partially just conventional, but a lot of tools makes use of the
structure (e.g., the log in cgit just shows the Subject), so if the
first line of the converted log messages are all:

 <date> <author>

that will look pretty confusing and weird. And it's not great even if
the first lines are

 gtk/gtkwidget.c:

Or something like that. An approach that has some some then is to
use something like the current stripping process to extract a guess
at a subject, and then repeat the log message minimally munged as
the body.

So the example I listed yesterday would become:

===
Strip out all Xft, FreeType, and pangoxft checking.

* configure.in: Strip out all Xft, FreeType, and pangoxft checking.
Rewrite X checks to use pkg-config as much as possible.

* gdk/win32/gdkfont-win32.c (gdk_font_from_description_for_display):
Make this return Arial always to avoid using PangoWin32FontMap. 
(X11 backend has always been returned "fixed" for a long time)

* gdk/linux-fb/gdkdrawable-fb2.c: Remove draw_glyphs() implementations,
fall through to the default implementation in terms of Cairo.

* gdk/linux-fb/gdkdrawable-fb2.c (gdk_fb_draw_text): Use
gdk_draw_glyphs() on the wrapper rather than gdk_fb_draw_glyphs().
===

- Owen