Re: Automating the maintenance of the ChangeLog file

[Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat dot com>]

* Tulio Magno Quites Machado Filho:

> J William Piggott <elseifthen@gmx.com> writes:
>
>> On Tue, 27 Nov 2018, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 2:29 AM Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>> * Zack Weinberg:
>>>>> Specifically, I propose:  Effective immediately, project policy
>>>>> requires the Git commit message for each commit to end with the full
>>>>> text of a traditional ChangeLog entry for that commit.
>>>>
>>>> How can I see what is part of the proposed commit (message) and what is
>>>> not during patch review?
>>>
>>> If we take `git format-patch` as a baseline, that means the subject
>>> line is the first line of the commit message, and everything in the
>>> email body up to the first line of the actual diff is the commit
>>> message. But sometimes one wants to say things in the email that
>>> aren't going to go into the commit message.  I don't have a good
>>> suggestion for how to handle that, ...
>>
>> Git already has a way to do that. The submitter can write anything they want to
>> between the '---' and 'diff ...'
>>
>> That is '---' ends the commit message.
>
> Git also supports scissors (from git-mailinfo(1)):
>
>        --scissors
>            Remove everything in body before a scissors line. A line
>            that mainly consists of scissors (either ">8" or "8<") and
>            perforation (dash "-") marks is called a scissors line, and
>            is used to request the reader to cut the message at that
>            line. If such a line appears in the body of the message
>            before the patch, everything before it (including the
>            scissors line itself) is ignored when this option is used.
>
>            This is useful if you want to begin your message in a
>            discussion thread with comments and suggestions on the
>            message you are responding to, and to conclude it with a
>            patch submission, separating the discussion and the
>            beginning of the proposed commit log message with a scissors line.
>
>            This can be enabled by default with the configuration
>            option mailinfo.scissors.
>
> git am also supports this.

Does our Patchwork instance support this?  Are there Gnus/mutt
extensions to highlight the relevant parts of a patch submission?

I want to make sure that both patch authors and reviewers can tell with
high confidence what is proposed for committing.  If we want to generate
ChangeLogs from commit message contents, I think we need to increase the
quality of commit messages.

Does GNU offer hosting for a development workflow which is closer to the
pull request model?

Thanks,
Florian