Hi Volker, On 2014-05-29, Volker Braun <vbraun.n...@gmail.com> wrote: >> : where that is, one cannot learn easily from git log, since >> $ git log | grep maxima | less >> $ git log | grep Maxima | less >> > > The git log is not a plain text file, its a directed acyclic graph. There > is much more useful information in it than any possible linearization.
If a simple question such as "what is the ticket number for the latest Maxima upgrade" is not easy to answer from the git log, then the information is *not* useful. The information exists, but is not useful. That's an important practical difference. Anyway, you have shown in your mail that it *is* possible to get the information in this case. Maxima is an spkg. Let's instead look at the Sage library. We can use "git blame" similar to "hg annotate" to get the revision in which a particular line of code was changed. This information can be used to search the corresponding commit message in the log. Before switching to git, we had the policy (enforced by commit hooks, if I recall correctly) that the commit message mentions the ticket number. I think this was very helpful. But now---because you keep saying that a commit does not belong to a specific ticket---the log often does not mention the ticket number. Some people mention the ticket number, others don't. Hence, when I wonder about a specific line of code and want to look up the discussion that took place on trac and resulted in this line of code: How can I easily find that discussion? Admittedly, one could argue that people shouldn't be so lazy and put the ticket number in. But then git causes a meta-problem: Some people advocating git go around and tell people that a commit does not belong to a ticket. Hence, people are not putting the ticket number into the commit message. And on the side of trac, there can not be an automatism that inserts the ticket number if it is missing, because "Changing a commit message is changing history"---which is something that I technically understand (the commit's sha1 hash depending on the commit message), but still consider it a flaw. > More > complicated than mailing patches? Sure. Why? Because mailing patches around > doesn't work at that scale. Yes, it only works on the tiny scale of Linux development, as William pointed out... :-D >> I don't know why the description of a ticket is ending up in the log. We >> want a description of what actually was done, and the description in the >> ticket is often full of brainstorming etc. >> > > Its up to you (the ticket author/reviewer) to make the description fit the > ticket. The main complaint was that the entire ticket description is ending up in the log. Don't you think that a ticket description has a different purpose than a commit message? Cheers, Simon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
