[webkit-dev] Embedding Identifiers in Commit Messages

[Jonathan Bedard]

> > We appreciate everyone’s feedback on transitioning away from Subversion to Git, I’ll be releasing an expected timeline of up-coming changes in the next week before the contributors meeting.
> >
> > In the mean time, we’re preparing on adding identifiers to new commit messages, that work is tracked in https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218407. <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218407.> At the moment, we’re likely going to be appending the identifiers to commit messages (as the current change proposes), but I wanted to provide a chance for folks to object to this change before it becomes canonical.

> I'm a bit confused here. It looks like the patch only affects commits
> made via webkit-patch. Given there are a lot of people who don't use
> webkit-patch land, I'm not certain this strategy is sound even in the
> short term. Furthermore, the proposed patch seems to have a race
> condition when multiple commits are made concurrency? Why don't we do
> this in post commit hook instead?

> - R. Niwa
We don’t have post commit hooks in SVN to do this sort of thing, and I don’t intend to add them now. We are going to have a system on GitHub to do this (not post commit hooks, but I won’t dive into the details here).

There really aren’t a lot of people who land changes outside of webkit-patch, among things that would break if folks were regularly not using webkit-patch is trac.webkit.org <http://trac.webkit.org/>, which relies on the commit message being set. The types of changes that would fall outside of this change would be ones that don’t map well to a git world anyways, like the creation of a tag or branch. Notably, commit-queue is using this script.

Lastly, this doesn’t add a race-condition that wasn’t already there. One of the downsides of SVN is that, unlike git, it is a centralized version control system, so clients must be synced to upstream before committing. This is true now, even if you haven’t noticed it. If we didn’t have this race condition, our changeling history would be full of weird conflicts.

Jonathan
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