[openstack-dev] Thoughts on ReleaseNoteImpact git commit message tag

Kashyap Chamarthy kchamart at redhat.com
Tue Jul 7 18:44:36 UTC 2015


On Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 09:35:13AM -0700, Dan Smith wrote:
> > The thing is, UpgradeImpact isn't always appropriate for the change,
> > but DocImpact is used too broadly and as far as I can tell, it's not
> > really for updating release notes [2].  It's for updating stuff
> > found in docs.openstack.org.
> > 
> > So we kicked around the idea of a ReleaseNoteImpact tag so that we
> > can search for those at the end of the release in addition to
> > UpgradeImpact.
> 
> So, I find that it's much better to write the release notes at the
> time we merge the thing. I have previously done that for things like
> the flavor migration stuff.
> 
> How about we just hold off on the +W until the author writes the
> actual release note themselves? 

This sounds useful, as it forces the author to write the detail while
it's fresh in their head.  But I can imagine how some people might not
prefer it, as it can be seen as yet another "gate" to get their patch
merged in.

A related idea I've come across[1] is to use `git-notes` to "annotate
the development commits with labels".  In this case label them with
ReleaseNotesImpact tag or similar, including the release notes verbiage.

Upstream OpenStack's Gerrit instance already uses `git-notes` to
annotate review info using the "refs/notes/review namespace"[2] (thanks
Clark Boylan for the hint on IRC).


[1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/half-baked-ideas-classify-git-commits-and-rule-based-branch-building/#content
[2] http://gerrit-documentation.googlecode.com/svn/Documentation/2.5.2/refs-notes-review.html

    To test it in any OpenStack upstream `git` repo:

        $ git fetch origin refs/notes/review:refs/notes/review
        $ git log --show-notes=review

> We could also have something like a tag for [pending review 123456] in
> the release notes in case something never merges so we can strip it
> later.
> 
> Anyway, the summary is: using a tag on the commit and constructing the
> release notes later seems suboptimal to me. Being better about writing
> release notes as we do things seems like a major win though.
> 

-- 
/kashyap



More information about the OpenStack-dev mailing list