Re: Use of "Action stamps" in commit messages

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

Eric Raymond designed that format, partly to be robust in the presence
of VC backend changes. I'll send this message to him directly, to give
him a heads-up, as this has been a long thread that he's likely tuned
out of.

On 07/13/2018 04:13 AM, Noam Postavsky wrote:
> .On 12 July 2018 at 11:34, Basil L. Contovounesios <contovob@tcd.ie> wrote:
>
>> from CONTRIBUTE:
>>
>>   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".
> This reminds that I'd like to remove this "Action stamp" thing as
> commit message convention. Action stamps are fine for what they were
> designed for: acting as a unique commit id for the repository
> conversion software "reposurgeon", but they are not very friendly to
> human readers.
>
> A date followed by the summary line is sufficient to identify a commit
> in a vc system agnostic way, reads nicer, and gives more info up front
> to a human.
>
> See also Bug#20609.
>
> https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=20609