Re: [PATCH] merge: indicate remote tracking branches in merge message

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 9, 2009, 21:49 UTC
Message-ID: <20090809214911.GA27796@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vprb47pam.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Sun, Aug 09, 2009 at 12:36:17PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> > Previously, merging a tag directly via "git merge tag" would
> > get you the message "Merge commit 'tag'". It is a little
> > more descriptive to note that it was actually a tag (i.e.,
> > "Merge tag 'tag'").
> 
> Maybe "Merge version 'v1.6.3'" or "Merge commit tagged as 'v1.6.3'"? 
> I dunno.

Definitely "Merge version" is bad. Doing "git tag feature-x-working" and merging it would lead to "Merge version 'feature-x-working'", which doesn't really make sense. I don't think the developer would refer to such a tag as a "version".

Your "Merge commit tagged as..." version is reasonable to me. I'm dubious whether the additional information that it was a tag is actually worth anything. That is, given

  (1) Merge commit '1234abcd'
  (2) Merge commit 'v1.6.3'
  (3) Merge tag 'v1.6.3'

where (1) is what we do now and will do in the future for arbitrary commits, (2) is what we do now for tags, and (3) is the proposed change. I am not sure that (3) really tells the reader anything useful over the other two. And your "Merge commit tagged as" is just the same information written slightly differently.

So maybe this patch should simply be dropped. I don't feel strongly either way.

-Peff