Commit comments - call for opinions

[Matthew Pickering]

I am in favor of option b) as it fits in better with the "gitlab way
of things". If we are to use gitlab then we should use it as it's most
intended rather than trying to retrofit trac practices which have
accrued over many years.

Adding commits as comments is just a hack in trac to work around
missing native support for the fundamental operation of linking a
commit to.

I don't really see that it is much more inconvenient to click on a
link to see the commit, the hash can be hovered over to see the commit
title.

Clicking on the link will then also give the full commit message but
also the full set of changes as well which is probably more useful.

Cheers,

Matt

On Thu, Feb 7, 2019 at 8:48 AM Tobias Dammers <tdammers at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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