Re: Deriving release notes from git commit messages

On 06/24/2011 03:28 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
> I expect that the correlation between commit and [various parties] is
> something that will need to take place outside git.
>

Agreed on everything except the "Author" information that is already
being placed into each commit. The right data is already going into
there, all it would take is some small amount of tagging to make it
easier to extract programatically.

> The existing CommitFest data goes quite a long ways towards capturing
> interesting information (with the likely exception of sponsorship);
> what it's missing, at this point, is a capture of what commit or
> commits wound up drawing the proposed patch into the official code
> base.

The main problem with driving this from the CommitFest app is that not
every feature ends up in there. Committers who commit their own work
are one source of those. Commits for bug fixes that end up being
notable enough to go into the release notes are another.

I agree it would be nice if every entry marked as "Committed" in the CF
app included a final link to the message ID of the commit closing it.
But since I don't ever see that being the complete data set, I find it
hard to justify enforcing that work. And the ability to operate
programatically on the output from "git log" is a slightly easier path
to walk down than extracting the same from the CF app, you avoid one
pre-processing step: extracting the right entries in the database to
get a list of commit IDs.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us