Re: Use of "Action stamps" in commit messages

[Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>]

On Fri 13 Jul 2018, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
>> I'm not sure having hyperlinks justifies the trouble of having to
>> concoct those stamps.  In a repository such as we have in Emacs, a
>> time stamp should allow you to find the commit fairly easily, I think.
>
> While this is true, experience leads me to fear a proliferation of
> varying and damaged timestamp formats uttered by people in a hurry.

If people are in a hurry, they should not be comitting changesets in the
first place.

> Only a convention as simple and strong as action stamps has any
> hope of being effective against this sort of drift.

THe linus kenel convention of shortened git sha1 plus commit message
summary line works well in that project. However, they also use
pre-commit review with only maintainers having push access to the repo,
and use automated tooling to ensure that the commit descriptions are in
the correct format. The requirements for pre-commit review is what keeps
everything working.

    AndyM