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What a good commit message looks like (2011)

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Re: What a good commit message looks like (2011)

#5

Post by philips »

abstractbeliefs wrote: post #2

For those who aren't familiar with the kernel process, what's the Reported-by line? Simply the reporter of any original bug that the patch was written to fix? I understand that the Signed-off-by line is equivalent to a CLA, right?

Yes, and many of the maintainer automations will email the reporter about the patch being merged into the various releases.

And signed-off-by is essentially a shorthand for agreement to this document: http://developercertificate.org/

Re: What a good commit message looks like (2011)

#6

Post by tych0 »

abstractbeliefs wrote: post #2

For those who aren't familiar with the kernel process, what's the Reported-by line? Simply the reporter of any original bug that the patch was written to fix? I understand that the Signed-off-by line is equivalent to a CLA, right?

Yes, Reported-by is the original reporter.

Signed-off-by is fallout from the SCO lawsuit. It has nothing to do with agreeing to any sort of CLA; it's just another way to confirm that the code was written by the person in Signed-off-by, or that the person in Signed-off-by thinks it was created under appropriate open source conditions (e.g. the company who paid the developer to write it is okay with it being released).

Re: What a good commit message looks like (2011)

#8

Post by struppi »

Recently, I try to write the first line of my commit messages so they describe what the system now does, compared to before the commit. This makes reading the history much more fun. Like:

    Validation of email addresses now sends a test email to the user, instead of the old regex that never worked.
This style does not work for all kinds of changes, but when it works, it creates a nice history of how the functionality of the system grew...

Re: What a good commit message looks like (2011)

#10

Post by merb »

Avshalom wrote: post #3

>74 characters path dependency is hell of a drug.

if you open a terminal window on mac with any kind of display 1080p, 4k whatever with any resolution you will still get a 80x24 terminal by default. Which is the whole purpose of `git log`. Using it on a terminal / ssh session / whatever.
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