[RFC] Amend commit messages

[Jason Harris]

On Feb 24, 2011, at 7:39 PM, timeless wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 8:19 PM, Jason Harris <jason at jasonfharris.com> wrote:
>> Shouldn't the history editing tools then be better here? Which is the real issue. The immutability of history is not really what you care about here it seems like... :)
> 
> history editing doesn't help if you only find out history isn't ok
> after you push to another host because some other client pulled from
> that host and complained to someone. it's already partially out in the
> wild.
> 
> picture:
> 
> <manager> - <anal-bot>
> |               |
> <dev> - <internal-dvcs> - <publisher> - <public-dvcs>
>                |
> <other-dev>
> 
> steps:
> 1. dev pushes something to internal-dvcs.
> 2. other-dev pulls from internal-dvcs
> 3. anal-bot pulls from internal-dvcs
> 4. anal-bot sends a report to manager
> 5. manager sends a report to dev
> 
> 6. dev cries
> 
> 6-1. dev needs to do something to satisfy manager | anal-bot, but
> <internal-dvcs> is append only.
> 
> 7. publisher doesn't publish to <public-dvcs> until much later (or
> never if ordered not to by manager because of anal-bot report).
> 
> 6-2. If dev can fix commit message to satisfy <anal-bot>, then life is
> better for dev.
> 
> 7-1. if <publisher> can use |hg convert| to fold those messages later
> before publishing to <public-dvcs>, then publication is more likely to
> happen. the alternative is roughly an export of a single delivered
> version (because of <anal-bot>/<manager>).
> 
> Note that as there's a general mapping available to <publisher> for
> <internal-dvcs> and <public-dvcs>, the fact that the changeset ids
> don't match doesn't really bother anyone too much. If this didn't
> happen, they'd still not match, but the tree topology wouldn't match
> either (single commit dumps for an entire release).

Well with that work flow, yep you are farily out of luck. Even so what happens if the problem is not just a commit message but say EOL wasn't correct. Then even with this extension you are still hosed. Or the anal-bot is some continuous integration server and has rejected the changes due to failing tests or something.

In any case I would suggest changes to the workflow but you like would already change it if you could...

Cheers,
  Jas