Commit Rules

Using sensible commit messages

When committing your changes to MacPorts' central port tree using subversion it is good practice to use properly formatted commit messages.

Think about others reading the timeline. Here you want to see on first glance which port got modified, therefore the recommended format for commit messages is this:

PORTNAME: COMMENT

Here a reader of MacPorts' timeline can quickly get the most important information, i.e. which port got changed and why.

A real-life example is:

zmq: Fix build on darwin <= 10, closes #40663

Note that references to Trac tickets can be inserted using the '#' as well as references to certain commits of the MacPorts repository by using 'r' (e.g. r111866).

If a change affects multiple ports, list all affected ports. If a change affects a large number of ports, listing their names is not necessary.