Thoughts on git commit mail

[Ulrich Spörlein]

On Thu, 2020-12-31 at 19:03:37 -0500, Ed Maste wrote:
>On Thu, 31 Dec 2020 at 17:14, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>> The mix of fields for name and date is a bit odd though.  Perhaps another
>> alternative might be to elide the Author fields if the Author == Committer?
>> That would keep a lean format when when the individuals are the same.
>> For that suggestion, I think you would always show the two Commit fields
>> ("Committer" and "CommitDate") and only show "Author" and "AuthorDate"
>> if Author != Committer?
>
>I discussed this a bit with John on IRC, but for the benefit of the list:
>
>We expect Author == Committer will be common, and the commit date is
>probably the more interesting date. In addition, committer will always
>be someone at FreeBSD.org, so what about if we take John's suggestion for
>Date, and use the author name, appending (via /committer/) if it's not
>the author?
>
>Thus, for the example above:
>
>Author: John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org> (via rlibby)
>Date: 2020-12-31 19:56:33 +0000
>
>This is nice and concise while conveying all useful information, IMO.
>This would work identically for MFCs of commits made by other
>committers, as well as committing changes submitted by 3rd parties.

I have no strong preference either way (because I use git log if I want 
to find out about things, something that now everyone has downloaded and 
is fast, as compared to SVN, so maybe behaviors need to change a 
little.)

Should we drop Committer and CommitDate from the logs entirely, because 
99% of the time it's just what is in the commit email From: and Date: 
headers anyway?

The thing is, folks that take their information from commit emails see 
the Date of the push and usually who pushed it (Committer) in their 
email client. The really nice information on these MFCs is, how old 
their actual author date is, as that shows you how laggy we are with 
MFC'ing.

And for commits to head, it's super interesting to see the potential 3rd 
party Authors we'll see in the future, and, again, the committer and the 
push date is shown in the email headers, so it's kinda redundant.

I would be biased against a more dynamic format that only sometimes 
shows information and sometimes doesn't, as that can be confusing.

Cheers
Uli