McEs, A Hacker Life: On Bugzilla reference in GNOME ChangeLog's

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

On Bugzilla reference in GNOME ChangeLog's

I've wanted to blog about this for a while...

Those who commit to my modules know, I use a slightly different format to mark bugs in commit messages, and I'm obsessed about it. The format is very simple:


2008-01-28  Behdad Esfahbod  

      Bug 512566 – dont' use deprecated macro
      Patch from Christian Persch

      * tests/test-ot-tags.c:
      * tests/testscript.c:
      Replace G_GNUC_PRETTY_FUNCTION by G_STRFUNC

What's so special about this format is:

Easy to remember which bug it is when reading it. Much more informative than the "(fixes #512566)" standard. I feel free to re-title bugs before fixing them.
Saves typing and my fingers appreciate it! I copy/paste the first line by copying it from bugzilla, with the em-dash and all.
When release time comes, I copy all new ChangeLog entries to my NEWS file and sort them out, collecting all the Bug lines into a "Bugs fixed in this release" section and summarizing the rest of the lines.

So, if you like that, go ahead and use it in your module.

If you don't like it, please be nice enough to obey it in my modules still. You follow coding style of neighboring code when writing a patch. Treat ChangeLog's the same. Thanks.

Labels: bugzilla, ChangeLog, gnome

¶ 11:11 AM

Comments:

Those two c files that you listed are those that patched files that you are referring?

Dealing with a few patches for example how would you deal with that?

I patch the way you don't like but I've only followed what other people do so I've never considered any other way.

Thanks for the example.

# posted by

Anonymous : January 29, 2008 5:53 AM

Not sure I fully understand your question. This post was mostly about the format of the ChangeLog entry. Multiple patches are better committed separately with separate ChangeLog entries.

# posted by

behdad : January 29, 2008 4:58 PM

Yep that was my question relating to multiple patches and bugs.

# posted by

Anonymous : January 29, 2008 5:08 PM

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