Re: Deriving release notes from git commit messages

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> -All of these other ways to analyze of the contributors would be much easier
> to maintain.  A little "Author:" decoration to that section of each commit
> would probably be welcome too.

I think you're quite right, that "mining" the commit logs for these
sorts of information is very much the right answer.

Initially, the choice has been to not use the Author tag in Git; I
think that came as part of the overall intent that, at least, in the
beginning, the workflow of the PostgreSQL project shouldn't diverge
terribly much from how it had been with CVS.

It makes sense to have some debate about additional features to
consider using to capture useful workflow. Sadly, I think that would
have been a very useful debate to have held at the Devs meeting in
Ottawa, when a lot of the relevant people were in a single room; it's
a bit harder now.

In any case, having some tooling to rummage through commits to
generate proposals for release notes seems like a fine idea. Even
without policy changes (e.g. - to start using Author:, and possibly
other explicit metadata), it would surely be possible to propose
release note contents that tries to use what it finds.

For instance, if the tool captured all email addresses that it finds
in a commit message, and stows them in a convenient spot, that makes
it easier for the human to review the addresses and classify which
might indicate authorship. Maybe a step ahead.
--
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"