Re: Use of "Action stamps" in commit messages

[Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>]

On Fri 13 Jul 2018, 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

The Linux kernel convention is nicer: the (shortened) commit id,
followed by a space and the commit summary line, e.g.

Fixes: 1222ff5275 ("Don't skip epg-tests even with gpg 2.0 (Bug#23561)")

This ensures that the format is human readable, is easy to parse for
scripting, and identifies the right commit even if the shortened commit
id is not unique.

     AndyM