Re: Recording the current branch on each commit?

From: James Denholm <nod.helm@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 27, 2014, 21:40 UTC
Message-ID: <53a594dd-cd3d-4b33-ada8-3d7e08b86ee2@email.android.com>
In-Reply-To: <535D3DF8.4020904@game-point.net>

I'm skipping a lot of the discussion here, sorry about that, but on one particular note:

Jeremy Morton <admin@game-point.net> wrote:

> (...) and besides it takes up space that could be 
>used for a commit message.  As short commit messages are valued in Git,
>it's particularly bad to waste space this way.

Not really. While different groups will have different values, the "greater git community" seems to prefer short _first lines_, of fifty chars or less, while the _body_ should be as verbose as it needs to be (but not more than). Ergo, while the first line shouldn't contain a swath of metadata, the body can easily.

A particularly good example of this is almost every commit to the git project itself - there are"Signed-of-by" lines and such everywhere in the logs.

>Also, you don't always have something you can link a commit to in an 
>issue tracker.  You may just be implementing a feature that has been 
>agreed upon, independently of any such tracker.  In that case, there's 
>no bug# to link to.

In which case, refer to whatever system you use. If you aren't using a ticketing system, have the line "Relates-to: Water cooler conversation with Bob on July 28th" or whatever the patches relate to.

(Arguably, though, the better solution is to use a ticketing system, or anything that allows discussion to be easily referenced.)

Regards, James Denholm.