Open Stack

On Aug 15, 2013, at 12:50 PM, Joe Gordon <joe.gordon0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 	• 
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Sam Harwell <sam.harwell at rackspace.com> wrote:
> I like to take a different approach. If my commit message is going to take more than a couple lines for people to understand the decisions I made, I go and make an issue in the issue tracker before committing locally and then reference that issue in the commit message. This helps in a few ways:
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> 1.       If I find a technical or grammatical error in the commit message, it can be corrected.
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> 2.       Developers can provide feedback on the subject matter independently of the implementation, as well as feedback on the implementation itself.
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> 3.       I like the ability to include formatting and hyperlinks in my documentation of the commit.
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> This pattern has one slight issue, which is:
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> 	• Do not assume the reviewer has access to external web services/site.
> In 6 months time when someone is on a train/plane/coach/beach/pub troubleshooting a problem & browsing GIT history, there is no guarantee they will have access to the online bug tracker, or online blueprint documents. The great step forward with distributed SCM is that you no longer need to be "online" to have access to all information about the code repository. The commit message should be totally self-contained, to maintain that benefit.

I'm not sure I agree with this.  It can't be true in all cases, so it can hardly be considered a rule.  A guideline, maybe - something to strive for.  But not all artifacts of the development process are amenable to being stuffed into code or the commits associated with them.  A dvcs is great and all, but unless one is working in a silo, online resources are all but mandatory.


m.

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> https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/GitCommitMessages#Information_in_commit_messages
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> Sam
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> From: Christopher Yeoh [mailto:cbkyeoh at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2013 7:12 AM
> To: OpenStack Development Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] Code review study
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> On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
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> This may interest data-driven types here.
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> https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/11-proven-practices-for-peer-review/
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> Note specifically the citation of 200-400 lines as the knee of the review effectiveness curve: that's lower than I thought - I thought 200 was clearly fine - but no.
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> Very interesting article. One other point which I think is pretty relevant is point 4 about getting authors to annotate the code better (and for those who haven't read it, they don't mean comments in the code but separately) because it results in the authors picking up more bugs before they even submit the code.
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> So I wonder if its worth asking people to write more detailed commit logs which include some reasoning about why some of the more complex changes were done in a certain way and not just what is implemented or fixed. As it is many of the commit messages are often very succinct so I think it would help on the review efficiency side too.
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> Chris
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