On Fri, 11 Jun 2021, Martin Sebor via Gcc wrote: > On 6/11/21 11:32 AM, Jonathan Wakely wrote: > > On Fri, 11 Jun 2021 at 18:02, Martin Sebor wrote: > > > My objection is to making our policies and tools more restrictive > > > than they need to be. We shouldn't expect everyone to study whole > > > manuals just to figure out how to successfully commit a change (or > > > learn how to format it just the right way). It should be easy. > > > > I agree, to some extent. But consistency is also good. The conventions > > for GNU ChangeLog formatting exist for a reason, and so do the > > conventions for good Git commit messages. > > > > > Setting this discussion aside for a moment and using a different > > > example, the commit hook rejects commit messages that don't start > > > ChangeLog entries with tabs. It also rejects commit messages that > > > don't list all the same test files as those changed by the commit > > > (and probably some others as well). That's in my view unnecessary > > > when the hook could just replace the leading spaces with tabs and > > > automatically mention all the tests. > > > > > > I see this proposal as heading in the same direction. Rather than > > > making the script fix things up if we get them wrong it would reject > > > the commit, requiring the user to massage the ChangeLog by hand into > > > an unnecessarily rigid format. > > > > You cannot "fix things up" in a server-side receive hook, because > > changing the commit message would alter the commit hash, which would > > require the committer to do a rebase to proceed. That breaks the > > expected behaviour and workflow of a git repo. > > > > You can use the scripts on the client side to verify your commit > > message before pushing, so you don't have to be surprised when the > > server rejects it. > > That sounds like a killer argument. Do we have shared client-side > scripts that could fix things up for us, or are we each on our own > to write them?
I hope I got your view wrong. If not: the "scripts fixing things up for us" direction is flawed (compared to the "scripts rejecting bad formats"), unless offered as a non-default option; please don't proceed. Why? For one, there'll always be bugs in the scripting. Mitigate those situations: while wrongly rejecting a commit is bad, wrongly "fixing things up" is worse, as a general rule. Better avoid that. (There's probably a popular "pattern name" for what I try to describe.) brgds, H-P
