[Insight-developers] Commit message prefixes

[David Cole]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 2:21 PM, David Doria <daviddoria at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 2:14 PM, Stephen Aylward <
> stephen.aylward at kitware.com> wrote:
>
>> Ok,
>>
>> I thought we had decided on ITK to use them many many years ago, and I
>> hadn't heard of a discussion to change.   Perhaps it was the VTK
>> folks.
>>
>> We did previously have hooks for these, right?
>>
>> Those 4-5 characters provide critical info.   If anything, we should
>> welcome them for the space and time they do save for those creating
>> the messages as well as those reading them.   They embody all things
>> good about shorthand, codes, keys, names, IDs, stereotypes, labels,
>> acronyms, and abbrevs. in a simple, universally accepted package that
>> only requires 4-5 characters per usage :)
>>
>> s
>
>
> I'm not sure how many prefixes there are, but the ones I know are BUG,
> STYLE, and ENH. If character count is the only concern, could they be
> shortened to B:, S:, and E: ? I vote +1 for mandatory prefixes.
>
> David
>
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The argument was brought up due to the switch to git. Since there are many
tools/places where git is used ( 'git log --oneline' or 'git shortlog' ) to
produce summary output, it is best to describe the change in 78 characters
or less for the first line, and then elaborate on that in subsequent lines
if necessary.

Some commits are easy to describe in one line, others not so much.

For bug fix commits, Brad and I have taken to using "(#12345)" as the suffix
on the first line.

All other commits should be sufficiently described in English such that
reading the one line indicates it's type.

The prefixes make it harder to come up with the one-liner....

At least those are the arguments.

I prefer not having the prefixes enforced. That way, I can just describe
what I did, and not worry about categorizing it and whether or not the
community will agree with my own categorization.


Another 2 cents,
David C.
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