wiki:CommitMessages

Version 6 (modified by raimue (Rainer Müller), 9 years ago) (diff)

Add headline

Commit Rules

General

  1. Mention the names of the affected ports (or state what they have in common if there are too many to list individually), since this information is not visible in the revision log
  2. Be specific about what changes were made (for example, when updating to a new upstream version, mention the version number) and, if it's not completely obvious, why they were made
  3. Reference any tickets that are related to the change, preferably with a Trac link

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.

Correcting mistakes

If you make a mistake in the commit message, our svn repository is configured so that you can edit it after the fact via

svn propedit --revprop svn:log -r XXX

(replacing XXX with the revision number).