bug#20609: 25.0.50; How to I easily generate the "action stamp" given a commit hash?

bug#20609: 25.0.50; How to I easily generate the "action stamp" given a commit hash?

[Dmitry Gutov]

CONTRIBUTE prohibits referencing commits the easy way, and instead asks
me to use "RFC3339 date followed by followed by the committer's email".

If reversing this decision is not an option, the least it could do it
provide a command-line invocation that would take a commit reference and
turn it into the action stamp in the specified format.

bug#20609: 25.0.50; How to I easily generate the "action stamp" given a commit hash?

[Noam Postavsky]

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Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> CONTRIBUTE prohibits referencing commits the easy way, and instead asks
> me to use "RFC3339 date followed by followed by the committer's email".
>
> If reversing this decision is not an option

I would like to propose doing away with this "action stamp" thing.  It
is okay for its original purpose: an almost-guaranteed-unique identifier
for an automated repository format conversion tool.  But it is not very
human-readable.  It is fairly awkward to come up with a git command that
comes up with the correct UTC timestamp.  We hardly use it anyway.

Giving just the date (no timestamp) plus summary line should be unique
enough, and is very human readable.


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From e2bfcc9f9a51e33215d30d4226216c029c182ec3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Noam Postavsky <npostavs@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2017 07:56:39 -0500
Subject: [PATCH] * CONTRIBUTE: Don't recommend action stamps (Bug#20609).

---
 CONTRIBUTE | 7 +++----
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/CONTRIBUTE b/CONTRIBUTE
index c324375bb0..79c127fbdc 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTE
+++ b/CONTRIBUTE
@@ -232,10 +232,9 @@ them right the first time, so here are guidelines for formatting them:
   switches to a different VCS.  So we recommend against that.
 
   One way to identify revisions is by quoting their summary line.
-  Another is with an action stamp - an RFC3339 date followed by !
-  followed by the committer's email - for example,
-  "2014-01-16T05:43:35Z!esr@thyrsus.com".  Often, "my previous commit"
-  will suffice.
+  Prefixing the summary with the commit date can give useful context
+  (use 'git show -s "--pretty=format:%cd \"%s\"" --date=short HASH' to
+  produce that).  Often, "my previous commit" will suffice.
 
 - There is no need to mention files such as NEWS and MAINTAINERS, or
   to indicate regeneration of files such as 'lib/gnulib.mk', in the
-- 
2.11.0

bug#20609: 25.0.50; How to I easily generate the "action stamp" given a commit hash?

[Stefan Kangas]

Noam Postavsky <npostavs@users.sourceforge.net> writes:

> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
>
>> CONTRIBUTE prohibits referencing commits the easy way, and instead asks
>> me to use "RFC3339 date followed by followed by the committer's email".
>>
>> If reversing this decision is not an option
>
> I would like to propose doing away with this "action stamp" thing.  It
> is okay for its original purpose: an almost-guaranteed-unique identifier
> for an automated repository format conversion tool.  But it is not very
> human-readable.  It is fairly awkward to come up with a git command that
> comes up with the correct UTC timestamp.  We hardly use it anyway.
>
> Giving just the date (no timestamp) plus summary line should be unique
> enough, and is very human readable.

Nothing has happened here in two years, but I think it's a good idea
to get rid of action stamps and replace them with something that we
can easily generate.  Noam's proposal seems to solve that.

Best regards,
Stefan Kangas

bug#20609: 25.0.50; How to I easily generate the "action stamp" given a commit hash?

[Noam Postavsky]

Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> writes:

> Noam Postavsky <npostavs@users.sourceforge.net> writes:
>
>> I would like to propose doing away with this "action stamp" thing.  It
>> is okay for its original purpose: an almost-guaranteed-unique identifier
>> for an automated repository format conversion tool.  But it is not very
>> human-readable.  It is fairly awkward to come up with a git command that
>> comes up with the correct UTC timestamp.  We hardly use it anyway.

I can add to this, it's not entirely clear whether the timestamp is
committer or author.  https://gitlab.com/esr/reposurgeon/issues/144

>> Giving just the date (no timestamp) plus summary line should be unique
>> enough, and is very human readable.
>
> Nothing has happened here in two years,

There was some discussion on emacs-devel,
https://lists.gnu.org/r/emacs-devel/2018-07/msg00461.html

> but I think it's a good idea to get rid of action stamps and replace
> them with something that we can easily generate.  Noam's proposal
> seems to solve that.

Yeah, I'm still inclined to remove action stamps.  I guess we should
also add a way to easily generate date + summary given a commit hash
(giving the the git repo may be needed as well, e.g., for cases where
your mail buffer doesn't live in the git repository you're talking
about).

bug#20609: 25.0.50; How to I easily generate the "action stamp" given a commit hash?

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Noam Postavsky <npostavs@gmail.com> writes:

>>> Giving just the date (no timestamp) plus summary line should be unique
>>> enough, and is very human readable.
>>
>> Nothing has happened here in two years,
>
> There was some discussion on emacs-devel,
> https://lists.gnu.org/r/emacs-devel/2018-07/msg00461.html

I did not read the entire thread, but the first response was Eli saying
"OK", and I agree, so I've applied Noam's patch to Emacs 28.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no