Commit messages and the move to git

[Segher Boessenkool]

Hi Richard,

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 04:48:03PM +0000, Richard Earnshaw (lists) wrote:
> On 18/11/2019 15:55, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
> >That immediately shows some of the shortcomings of this approach: the
> >subject line is much too long, but more importantly, it doesn't make
> >much sense: it is not what the patch does, it is the description of a
> >bug that is related in some way to this patch.  It is not uncommon for
> >a commit to not fix the problem mentioned in the bug report (if it *is*
> >a problem!), or not fix it completely.
> >
> >Then again, changing all such subject lines to read "patch" could also
> >already be considered an improvement.
> 
> Well the real question is whether such a summary is worse than the 
> current situation of just printing the author in the wrong field.  I 
> personally don't think it is.

I think that non-obviously-wrong-but-still-wrong info is not something
we should introduce.  And, I think this will happen a *lot*.

Maybe you can just put in artificial subjects like "Patch related to
PR12345" or the like?  That is correct, displays a lot better, and is
at least as useful (imo).

> There are about 560 commits where the code highlights that the data 
> might be suspect (usually a category mismatch).

What about commits that mention multiple PRs?  What do you do for those?
(Are there as many of those as I think, anyway?)  With normally very short
subjects you could put all of them in there :-)


Segher