git gcc-commit-mklog doesn't extract PR number to ChangeLog

[Martin Sebor]

On 6/11/21 11:32 AM, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jun 2021 at 18:02, Martin Sebor wrote:
>> My objection is to making our policies and tools more restrictive
>> than they need to be.  We shouldn't expect everyone to study whole
>> manuals just to figure out how to successfully commit a change (or
>> learn how to format it just the right way).  It should be easy.
> 
> I agree, to some extent. But consistency is also good. The conventions
> for GNU ChangeLog formatting exist for a reason, and so do the
> conventions for good Git commit messages.
> 
>> Setting this discussion aside for a moment and using a different
>> example, the commit hook rejects commit messages that don't start
>> ChangeLog entries with tabs.  It also rejects commit messages that
>> don't list all the same test files as those changed by the commit
>> (and probably some others as well).  That's in my view unnecessary
>> when the hook could just replace the leading spaces with tabs and
>> automatically mention all the tests.
>>
>> I see this proposal as heading in the same direction.  Rather than
>> making the script fix things up if we get them wrong it would reject
>> the commit, requiring the user to massage the ChangeLog by hand into
>> an unnecessarily rigid format.
> 
> You cannot "fix things up" in a server-side receive hook, because
> changing the commit message would alter the commit hash, which would
> require the committer to do a rebase to proceed. That breaks the
> expected behaviour and workflow of a git repo.
> 
> You can use the scripts on the client side to verify your commit
> message before pushing, so you don't have to be surprised when the
> server rejects it.

That sounds like a killer argument.  Do we have shared client-side
scripts that could fix things up for us, or are we each on our own
to write them?

Martin