[Nagiosplug-devel] Git commit e-mails

[Holger Weiss]

* Andreas Ericsson <ae at op5.se> [2009-05-22 11:45]:
> Ton Voon wrote:
> > I would personally prefer one email per commit as it is easier to  
> > glance at what is happening and just read the subject to get an idea  
> > of the changes and the importance. The 5 minute delay is not a big deal.
> > 
> > A quick look at the nagiosplug-checkins list (which has 181 members)  
> > shows out of 38 members, 4 wanted a digest. So 90% of the members to  
> > this list prefer individual emails. If git sends out individual  
> > emails, then the list digest would act as the summary view.
> > 
> > However, I'd cede to the majority if a summarised view is preferred.
>
> Personally I like to get things as one email, and getting the diff in
> the email is *usually* not interesting (assuming proper commit messages
> are always written).

I guess my preference is somewhere in between.  Sometimes I'm interested
in how a change is implemented, sometimes I'm not.  Sometimes I'm just
enough interested take a quick peek at the patch in the e-mail, but not
interested enough to fire up Git :-)  Therefore, I like having the diff
appended to the end of the e-mail, where it doesn't hurt.

> A nice mail-format would be something like this:
> git shortlog -ns old..new; git shortlog old..new; git log old..new
>
> [...]
>
> I personally prefer that since it's quite common to do multiple commits to
> implement a single feature, and this way one gets all the commits in one go.

Agreed.  That's why "one e-mail per push" is different from a digest,
which simply stuffs any commits which happened during a given time frame
into a single e-mail, no matter whether or not they're related.

That said, we don't really commit large patch serieses that often and I
guess it's unlikely that this will change dramatically in the
foreseeable future, so we'd probably gain less by summarizing multiple
commits within a single e-mail than larger projects do.  Therefore, I'd
be fine with one e-mail per commit, too.

> Ofcourse, it would be easier if you could just use the post-receive hook,

Yap.

Holger