commit mail subject format

[Aggelos Economopoulos]

Sascha Wildner wrote:
> Peter Avalos schrieb:
>> I agree with this.  To go even further, why not have the subject
>> actually say wihat the commit is?  A commit message should be
>> structured with the first line acting as a subject, so why not put that
>> in the subject of the email?  That way we can actually see what the
>> commit does, rather than numbers and letters that aren't really telling
>> me whether I should read that email or not.
> 
> After replacing the paths with summaries, how would someone search for
> commits to certain files using only his mail/news client?

Do we want to support that? Your paragraph below suggests (better, IMHO)
alternatives.

> Full text search? Hmm, not possible using NNTP unless you download all
> articles. Use gitweb or search the repo? Well not all of us read the
> mailing lists on the same box (or platform even) where they keep the
> repo. And having to keep an additional window open just to see what was
> changed doesn't seem like an improvement for me, personally.

So don't read commits@ to keep up with the changes going in, just use
git log or gitk to read the commits directly. Works on windows too :)

> Summaries are sub-optimal for the Subject since they are human generated
> and humans make spelling errors, might forget the
> commit-structuring-rules and tend to formulate things differently from
> what the guy who is searching might expect.

Again, if you want to search for changes touching a file, use git. If
you want to search for a commit description, human messages are just as
accurate in git as they were in cvs ;)

> I can understand that it
> sounds like a good thing, but I fear that daily practice will not live
> up to it.

Yah, needs education (convince everyone it makes sense) and discipline
(until all committers get used to it at least).

> Paths in the subject, on the other hand, are certainly not optimal but
> at least they are much more reliable. Of all the commit mailing lists
> I'm on, there isn't a single one that doesn't at tell me in the subject
> at least which directories were affected by the commit.

I can live with paths in the subject too. I think everyone agrees that's
better than the current subject format.

Aggelos