Re: fmt-merge-message: add empty line between tag and signature verification

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: May 25, 2012, 17:20 UTC
Message-ID: <CA+55aFwwUzErbcCGa597N4G7i-_mYso+aJO_0aRq0jNBOi9=ew@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vtxz4tcmn.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 10:05 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>
>> Btw, I'd also like to see the merge notes (notably the conflict file list)
>> before the generated shortlog, but that seems to really not work with the
>> current fmt-merge-message model.  Oh well.
>
> Postponing to assess if such a change is feasible, I am not sure if that
> ordering makes more sense than the current one.  Is the objective to more
> strongly motivate people to explain what happened to the conflicts?

Yes. Right now, the conflict line is hidden way at the bottom, and I've actually overlooked it several times (and I don't think I'm the only one - do "git log --grep=Conflicts:" on the kernel tree and you'll see a lot of people just leaving them be).

And even when I *don't* overlook it, it's actually annoying to go to them and edit them. They're not at the very end (that's the big comment about merging), and due to the shortlog the conflicts are usually listed at least one screenful down.

And if you *don't* edit them, they end up pretty ugly and useless. I like to at the very least make them a bit more compact and readable, ie something like

    Fix up trivial conflicts in arch/arm/mach-ux500/{Makefile,board-mop500.c}

instead of listing them individually, but preferably actually talk about what the conflicts were about, eg

    Fix up add-add onflicts in arch/x86/xen/enlighten.c due to addition of
    apic ipi interface next to the new apic_id functions.

which I think makes it more worthwhile to talk about the conflicts.

In fact, I think that if you *don't* edit them at all, you might as well just leave the conflict data out entirely, and it might be worth making the automatic conflict information be commented by default. But then it *really* needs to be above the shortlog so that it's not hidden away.

That said, this is all "minor tweaking". The current thing certainly works. I just think it could be better. Clearly a lot of people do not edit the conflict information even when it is right there (see the same "git log --grep" above), and it looks like I'm sadly alone in trying to make good merge messages.

                   Linus