Mailing List Archive

Tres Seaver wrote:

...

> I actually *hate* having the log message in the 'Subject:' line. The
> code which attempts to guess which bits of the checkin message to
> include sucks at this point (e.g., "
>
> Re: SVN: Zope3/trunk/functional_tests/ Remove unused directory.

Huh? This looks pretty good to me. I can see, just be looking at the subject,
what are of the repository was affected and what was done.

Note that the extra space (actually newline) was added by mailman AFAICT.

The orginal subject was:

SVN: Zope3/trunk/functional_tests/ Remove unused directory.

Which I'm very happy with.

I'll also note that "sucks" is not very descriptive. I'm guessing
that you are unhappy with the extra space, but I have know way of
knowing.


> Perhaps we might adopt a rigid policy which requires a concise,
> single-line summary as the first non-blank line of the commit message,

I think that would be a nice convention. I don't think it needs to be
rigid. IMO, gaving the first line of the log in the subject is a nice
convenience.

> (or add a leading 'Subject:' to the summary line?).

nah


> I find the messages generated by CVS to much more predictable,
> "scannable," and useful.

Could you be more specific? I don't find them all that scannable.
I wrote some scripts to try to analyze the email database and
found the data to be not nearly so predictable and scannable as it might
appear.

Do you have any specific suggestions?

> I realize that because SVN produces only one
> message for a cross-directory change, it has a somewhat more complex task.

The task dosn't seem that complex to me.

Note that this makes things simpler, especially for the reader, because
all of the information for a commit is in *one* email message.

Jim

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Jim Fulton wrote:
> Tres Seaver wrote:
>
> ...
>
>> I actually *hate* having the log message in the 'Subject:' line. The
>> code which attempts to guess which bits of the checkin message to
>> include sucks at this point (e.g., "
>>
>> Re: SVN: Zope3/trunk/functional_tests/ Remove unused directory.
>
>
> Huh? This looks pretty good to me. I can see, just be looking at the
> subject,
> what are of the repository was affected and what was done.
>
> Note that the extra space (actually newline) was added by mailman AFAICT.
>
> The orginal subject was:
>
> SVN: Zope3/trunk/functional_tests/ Remove unused directory.
>
> Which I'm very happy with
>
> I'll also note that "sucks" is not very descriptive. I'm guessing
> that you are unhappy with the extra space, but I have know way of
> knowing.

Extra spaces aside, I don't think that the guessed description adds
enough value to pay for the cost of the "visual" clutter. The
readability *in the list of e-mails* goes down rapidly (our current
example is practically a best case; note that "chatty" comments are not
uncommon). I would vastly prefer just:

SVN: Zope3/trunk/functional_tests/

BTW, This thread is not the first time I expressed my dislike for the
current Subject: line stuff. See:

http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-coders/2004-May/004890.html

I got at least one "yeah, me too" (off list) to that request.

Tres.
--
===============================================================
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[Jim Fulton]
...
> Note that the extra space (actually newline) was added by mailman AFAICT.

Good -- finally a technical issue <wink>. What it looks like varies across
email clients. The actual Subject (from the headers) is something like:

Subject: [Zope3-checkins] Re: SVN: Zope3/trunk/functional_tests/ Remove
unused directory.
^ there's a tab character here

That is, it's split across physical lines. How clients display this varies.
Some normalize "continuation whitespace" to a single blank, which is the
most sensible thing to do. Sounds like Tres's leaves it as a tab. Outlook
removes it entirely, so it displays like "... Removeunused ...", and since
I'm using Outlook for this reply, that's why the Subject line on *this*
message has "unuseddirectory" run together (the Subject header on the msg
I'm replying to was split after "unused").

For the non-technical part, I like the "enhanced" subject lines we get on
SVN checkins. I find them helpful. I also find one msg per checkin (as
opposed to one per directory) very helpful. While it doesn't really need
this help, my spambayes classifier has learned that "SVN:" in a Subject line
is a strong ham clue.

+1 on a convention of starting checkin comments with a brief summary line.


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Tres Seaver wrote:

...

> Extra spaces aside, I don't think that the guessed description adds
> enough value to pay for the cost of the "visual" clutter. The
> readability *in the list of e-mails* goes down rapidly (our current
> example is practically a best case; note that "chatty" comments are not
> uncommon). I would vastly prefer just:
>
> SVN: Zope3/trunk/functional_tests/

I guess this is a matter of taste. I like having the text there,
but I don't feel strongly about it. I'd be happy to bow to
whatever the majority thinks. It apears though that I'm not alone
in liking it.

Jim

--
Jim Fulton mailto:jim@zope.com Python Powered!
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Tres Seaver wrote:

> I actually *hate* having the log message in the 'Subject:' line.

+1 I thought it was a bug up until now.
Also seems to incur odd characters which show up as a square box in Mozilla.
What ARE those?


> Perhaps we might adopt a rigid policy which requires a concise,
> single-line summary as the first non-blank line of the commit message,

Bah :(

> I find the messages generated by CVS to much more predictable,
> "scannable," and useful.

+1

> At the moment, the prefix is useful because the messages are also going
> to lists which still have traffic from CVS.

+1

Chris

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