Open Stack

On 28/09/15 05:47, Gorka Eguileor wrote:
> On 26/09, Morgan Fainberg wrote:
>> As a core (and former PTL) I just ignored commit message -1s unless there is something majorly wrong (no bug id where one is needed, etc).
>>
>> I appreciate well formatted commits, but can we let this one go? This discussion is so far into the meta-bike-shedding (bike shedding about bike shedding commit messages) ... If a commit message is *that* bad a -1 (or just fixing it?) Might be worth it. However, if a commit isn't missing key info (bug id? Bp? Etc) and isn't one long incredibly unbroken sentence moving from topic to topic, there isn't a good reason to block the review.

+1

>> It is not worth having a bot -1 bad commits or even having gerrit muck with them. Let's do the job of the reviewer and actually review code instead of going crazy with commit messages.

+1

>> Sent via mobile
>>
>
> I have to disagree, as reviewers we have to make sure that guidelines
> are followed, if we have an explicit guideline that states that
> the limit length is 72 chars, I will -1 any patch that doesn't follow
> the guideline, just as I would do with i18n guideline violations.

Apparently you're unaware of the definition of the word 'guideline'. 
It's a guide. If it were a hard-and-fast rule then we would have a bot 
enforcing it already.

Is there anything quite so frightening as a large group of people 
blindly enforcing rules with total indifference to any sense of 
overarching purpose?

A reminder that the reason for this guideline is to ensure that none of 
the broad variety of tools that are available in the Git ecosystem 
effectively become unusable with the OpenStack repos due to wildly 
inconsistent formatting. And of course, even that goal has to be 
balanced against our other goals, such as building a healthy community 
and occasionally shipping some software.

There are plenty of ways to achieve that goal other than blanket 
drive-by -1's for trivial inconsistencies in the formatting of 
individual commit messages. A polite comment and a link to the 
guidelines is a great way to educate new contributors. For core 
reviewers especially, a comment like that and a +1 review will *almost 
always* get you the change you want in double-quick time. (Any 
contributor who knows they are 30s work away from a +2 is going to be 
highly motivated.)

> Typos are a completely different matter and they should not be grouped
> together with guideline infringements.

"Violations"? "Infringements"? It's line wrapping, not a felony case.

> I agree that it is a waste of time and resources when you have to -1 a
> patch for this, but there multiple solutions, you can make sure your
> editor does auto wrapping at the right length (I have mine configured
> this way), or create a git-enforce policy with a client-side hook, or do
> like Ihar is trying to do and push for a guideline change.
>
> I don't mind changing the guideline to any other length, but as long as
> it is 72 chars I will keep enforcing it, as it is not the place of
> reviewers to decide which guidelines are worthy of being enforced and
> which ones are not.

Of course it is.

If we're not here to use our brains, why are we here? Serious question. 
Feel free to use any definition of 'here'.

> Cheers,
> Gorka.
>
>
>
>>> On Sep 26, 2015, at 21:19, Ian Wells <ijw.ubuntu at cack.org.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>> Can I ask a different question - could we reject a few simple-to-check things on the push, like bad commit messages?  For things that take 2 seconds to fix and do make people's lives better, it's not that they're rejected, it's that the whole rejection cycle via gerrit review (push/wait for tests to run/check website/swear/find change/fix/push again) is out of proportion to the effort taken to fix it.

I would welcome a confirmation step - but *not* an outright rejection - 
that runs *locally* in git-review before the change is pushed. Right 
now, gerrit gives you a warning after the review is pushed, at which 
point it is too late.

>>> It seems here that there's benefit to 72 line messages - not that everyone sees that benefit, but it is present - but it doesn't outweigh the current cost.

Yes, 72 columns is the correct guideline IMHO. It's used virtually 
throughout the Git ecosystem now. Back in the early days of Git it 
wasn't at all clear - should you have no line breaks at all and let each 
tool do its own soft line wrapping? If not, where should you wrap? Now 
there's a clear consensus that you hard wrap at 72. Vi wraps git commit 
messages at 72 by default.

The output of "git log" indents commit messages by four spaces, so 
anything longer than 76 gets ugly, hard-to-read line-wrapping. I've also 
noticed that Launchpad (or at least the bot that posts commit messages 
to Launchpad when patches merge) does a hard wrap at 72 characters.

A much better idea than modifying the guideline would be to put 
documentation on the wiki about how to set up your editor so that this 
is never an issue. You shouldn't even have to even think about the line 
length for at least 99% of commits.

cheers,
Zane.