[Nix-dev] On commit naming conventions

[Louis Taylor]

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 12:26 PM, zimbatm <zimbatm at zimbatm.com> wrote:
> Each contributor has his own motivations and every round were we provide
> feedback is another one where we might lose the contributor. He might run
> out of energy, or have moved onto other things.
>
> Even after improving the CONTRIBUTING.md, naming of commits is still a
> really big friction to getting valid code into nixpkgs. I'm talking of how
> commits should be named after a patter like "package: init at x.y.z" or
> "package: a.b.c -> x.y.z".
>
> I must admit I don't really know the motivations behind this rule. All I can
> think of it that we could theoretically build some tooling and get pretty
> cool stats out of it. And that spelunking git history becomes a tiny bit
> easier.
>
> Given all that I think we should reconsider that rule. In my opinion if a
> contributor submits valid nix code that is useful to the project we should
> just be able to merge it and move forward. For me it's more important than
> the commit naming rule.

I don't think it is necessary to throw out that naming convention to
keep new contributors happy. The person with commit rights who is
performing the merge can --amend the commit to keep it in line with
naming conventions just before they merge. Commit messages are easy to
change, so it doesn't need to be a back-and-forth review process if
there is a prescribed format.

Louis