Commit comments - call for opinions

[Tobias Dammers]

Dear all,

So far, we had a feature in Trac where git commit messages mentioning a
ticket would automatically be copied into a comment on that commit. See,
for example, this comment:

https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/13615#comment:47

GitLab does things slightly differently. It has "live" git repository
information available, and rather than the relatively static comment
list we see in Trac, it synthesizes a "timeline" style list of events
relevant to an issue, which includes comments ("notes"), but also issue
status updates, git commits, and other things. So when a commit mentions
a GitLab issue, then GitLab will insert a link to that commit into the
issue's event timeline.

This means that in principle, copying commit messages into notes would
be redundant, and we initially decided to ignore commit comments during
the Trac/GitLab migration. However, it also means that the issue
timeline will no longer display the actual commit message anymore, just
a link to the commit ("@username mentioned this issue in commit
1234beef" or similar). So what used to be a narrative that you could
read top-down to retrace the issue's history is now a bit more
scattered.

Now, the ideal solution would be for GitLab to instead display the full
commit message, but I don't see this happening anytime soon, because it
would require a patch to GitLab itself. So we're left with two options:

a) Import commit comments as notes, duplicating the commit message into
the note, and having both the full commit note and a hyperlinked commit
reference in the issue timeline.

b) Don't import commit comments as notes, just rely on GitLab to insert
the hyperlinked commit reference.

If any of you have any preference either way, please do tell.

Thanks!

-- 
Tobias Dammers - tdammers at gmail.com