Re: [PATCH] have merge put FETCH_HEAD data in commit message

From: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@dev.mellanox.co.il>
Date: Apr 4, 2007, 06:02 UTC
Message-ID: <20070404060213.GB31984@mellanox.co.il>
In-Reply-To: <7v7it7kkl9.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Quoting Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>:
Subject: Re: [PATCH] have merge put FETCH_HEAD data in commit message

Show 14 quoted lines

> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@dev.mellanox.co.il> writes:
> 
> >> > 3. if I want to have some text coming *before* the commit
> >> >    message ignored, there's no way to do this
> >> > 4. there's no way to override the subject from within the message
> >> >    (like there is with author/From line)
> >> 
> >> How about this?
> >
> > Looks good. What about 3?
> 
> When e-mailed message has garbage at the beginning (e.g. "Hi!"),
> git users can either run "commit --amend" immiediately after
> "git am",

This one would overwrite the authorship information though, would it not? I actually wished several times for an --amend-message commit flag that would only edit the message, preserving the author (and possibly date?) metadata. Of course, I simply copy the author and pass it in --author, but it's somewhat awkward to do. Do others notice this?

*Maybe* git can be even smarter, and notice that only commit message has changed, and preserve the author automatically in this case? I haven't looked at how hard that would be to do.

<rant> I actually find it awkward that author/summary information is never shown during git commit - sometimes one does git commit on a machine where GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL has not been setup correctly, and the result often is mst@mst-desktop.(none). Or people sometimes forget that the first line will show up in the pretty=short summary and the result is that what ends up being there is just 2 first lines of the long description.

One has to remember to always do git log --pretty=short after commit to verify that one did get these details right.

Ideas:
- Maybe have git-commit display shortlog summary for commit just created?
- Maybe put Author: (or From:? and maybe Subject:?) line in the pre-formatted
  commit message, and let the user edit them?
</rant>

Show 10 quoted lines

> or edit the mbox with editor before running
> "applymbox", so the need has not been felt much us, and that is
> the primary reason why it is not there.  Additionally we do not
> think it is particularly a good practice to have "cover letters"
> at the top (cf. $gmane/5418), so it was never high priority for
> us to add that feature to encourage such a practice.
> 
> Having said that, on top of the recent work by Don Zickus on
> mailinfo, you _could_ add support for scissors "^-- >8 --$" if
> you want.

OK, I thought about this a bit - if the message includes a cover letter, I think it's also likely to have an incorrect subject too. So how about simply ignoring text before Subject:/From: lines? This makes more sense, for me, than inventing yet another git-specific convention. Does this for you?

-- 
MST