Commit comments - call for opinions

Thu Feb 7 10:34:32 UTC 2019

On Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 09:22:28AM +0000, Simon Peyton Jones wrote:
> |  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.
> 
> Can you show an example of such a time-line? Where is it displayed?
> The "Discussion" tab perhaps?

The timeline I'm talking about is simply the "activity list" right below
the issue body. I did just realize however that our gitlab instance
doesn't currently display any commits mentioning the issue. I haven't
dug into it very deeply, but the research I've done so far suggests that
this should in fact happen; the GitLab documentation explicitly says
that mentioning issues in commits will link the two together, and this
should generate an entry in the activity list. I can imagine, however,
that this only works if the commit gets pushed after the issue has been
created, which means we would have to somehow cater for this as part of
the import. I will investigate further. If anyone happens to know
whether this is indeed the cause, please do tell.

> Personally I like what we are doing now, with the commit message
> inline. Clicking links to see useful information gets in the way.
> (I'm not sure if even the title/author/date of the commit are
> displayed.)

If and when that feature works, it will display:

- Commit author
- Commit hash
- Commit date (though possibly mangled into a "humane" format, e.g. "6
  hours ago").

E.g.:

"Simon Peyton-Jones @simonpj mentioned in commit abc123 2 months ago"

The commit message is not included however.

> |  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.
> 
> I'm in favour of this.  It just preserves history and doesn't commit
> us for the future.

> One more question: currently the commit appears as a comment in every
> Trac ticket that is mentioned in the text of the commit message.
> That's _really_ useful, because it signals (in those related tickets)
> that there's a relevant commit to watch out for.  Will it continue to
> be the case?

According to the GitLab documentation, mentioning any issue in any
commit (or merge request, even) will link the two, so yes, you can
absolutely mention multiple issues in one commit, and they will all be
linked. GitLab does not support duplicating the text into the issue
timeline verbatim however; if we want that even for future commits, then
we will have to come up with some sort of hack (either patch GitLab to
do it on the fly, or run some external bot that injects them as plain
notes).

> |  -----Original Message-----
> |  From: ghc-devs <ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf Of Tobias Dammers
> |  Sent: 07 February 2019 08:48
> |  To: GHC Devs <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
> |  Subject: Commit comments - call for opinions
> |  
> |  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://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fghc.has
> |  kell.org%2Ftrac%2Fghc%2Fticket%2F13615%23comment%3A47&data=02%7C01%7C
> |  simonpj%40microsoft.com%7C4e4e4de2a28141c38bfd08d68cd9015b%7C72f988bf86f1
> |  41af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C636851260994463920&sdata=JpLtBith2iW2N
> |  fbYdZOt7dsjhKm1Ram7QCgR7aeiVUs%3D&reserved=0
> |  
> |  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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> |  devs&data=02%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C4e4e4de2a28141c38bfd08d
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-- 
Tobias Dammers - tdammers at gmail.com