[webkit-dev] WebKit Transition to Git

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2020 at 3:16 am, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
> I've gotta say I'm very much concerned about getting rid of change
> logs when we move to Git. We put a lot of useful information about
> what was causing the bug, how we fixed it, and why we fixed the way we
> did in a change log. I've seen a few projects which transitioned to
> Git and somehow lost the rigor in maintaining an equally high quality
> commit message, partly because most code review tools don't let you
> add inline comments to commit messages.

You may not be able to add inline comments on commit messages, but I've 
never been particularly concerned about that. You can still start a new 
discussion thread mentioning the problem with the commit message that 
you'd like to see resolved, blocking merge until the discussion thread 
is resolved. Although in GNOME we don't often have problems with 
low-quality commit messages, we do sometimes, and during review we 
treat that as we would any problem with the code. Having a set of 
guidelines for writing commit messages, like [1], might help. But yes, 
we do lose the ability to do inline comments during code review.

(Anyway, this is only a tangent, since of course we can switch to 
GitHub but still keep ChangeLog files if we decided to do that.)

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Git/CommitMessages