Re: [RFC] Suggestion of minor change to patch submission policy re: long descriptions in commit headers

[Phil Blundell <philb@gnu.org>]

On Tue, 2011-09-13 at 17:46 -0700, Joshua Lock wrote:
> Whilst I intend to rectify the latter I'd like to propose we change the
> former such that the defect information is at the end of the commit
> message.
> 
> I believe this is more suitable for the project because the defect
> information and its relevance should be summarised in the long
> description, and therefore the defect id and link to the defect tracker
> are supplemental information for interested readers.
> 
> IMHO this supplementary nature should lead us to request submitters
> provide defect information after the long description.

Agreed, I think this would be something of an improvement (and indeed,
from a look at the git log it appears that some submitters are already
doing this).  Although it isn't a very big deal, I do find it slightly
irritating to have the first line of the long checkin message be
something that is essentially noise.

Possibly even better would be to think up a way to encode the defect
information, in some machine-readable form, as part of the
pseudo-header.  That would make it straightforward for folks who care
particularly about the defect information for (say) yocto to filter it
into some more prominent location.

p.