Git repository mail notifications

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 28 May 2013 07:22:53 John Ralls wrote:
> On May 28, 2013, at 6:36 AM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:
> > You may have noticed that the mail notifications for gnucash-htdocs have a
> > new format with the repository switched to pure git.
> > 
> > The new notifications are generated by a script I found on the internet
> > with some gnucash project-specific modifications. Most of the format has
> > been discussed before on this list.
> > 
> > As we are now using it for the first time on a live, pure git repo some
> > small new things have come up which I would like to point out and ask
> > feedback on.
> > 
> > 1. There seems to be an encoding issue somewhere. This is visible in the
> > notification mail for the "svn_last" tag I generated:
> > Andreas Köhler is displayed as Andreas Köhler
> > I'll see if I can fix this.
> > 
> > 2. I created a tag "svn_last" to mark the last commit in history that is
> > still in sync with our now read-only svn repository. An unexpected side
> > effect of this is that each subsequent notification message now starts
> > with this tag in the subject line. Before, the subject started with the
> > last commit's hashref.
> > I do actually prefer the tag usage. It gives an idea of what base the
> > commit is starting from. On the other hand "svn_last" is not really
> > descriptive for the current state of the website. So I probably should
> > add two more tags (on on the master branch and one on the beta branch).
> > I'm just wondering what would make sensible tags for the website ? We
> > don't really do "releases" there. So a v2.4.x doesn't really make sense.
> > What would ? "stable" ? "prod" ? "main" ? ...
> > 
> > 3. Similar things will happen when we fully migrate gnucash and
> > gnucash-docs to git. Both repositories already have a number of tags (for
> > each release), but due to the way the svn-git bridge works none of these
> > tags is actually on the trunk of 2.4 branch. Instead each tag is a
> > separate branch with one commit and the (git) tag attached to it. In
> > itself this doesn't really matter.
> > 
> > 4. But it will affect the first real tags we add to the pure git
> > repository. My understanding of the notification script is that when we
> > add a tag to the repo it will search for the most recent previous tag on
> > the same branch. It will then summarize the changes since that tag.
> > Again, due to how the git-svn bridge works, we don't have any tags (yet)
> > on our primary development branch (trunk/master). So the summary will be
> > monstrous: all commits starting from the very first commit in cvs will be
> > in there. I've seen this happen with each release since I added the git
> > notification script (I had set up the system to send mails to me
> > privatly). To avoid that, I would propose to add initial tags to each
> > branch we consider active once we fully switch to git. At the minimum, we
> > should add a tag for the most recent release on the trunk branch. That
> > will likely be a future 2.5.x release or the 2.6 release (depending on
> > when we do the last release of the 2.4 series). The one caveat: we can't
> > add the same tag to two different commits. So if we want to tag releases
> > that are tagged in svn as well, we can't use the same tag name. I don't
> > know what would be best, but this is something we should keep in mind
> > when we fully switch to git.
> 
> Is this for commit-mail a.k.a gnucash-patches? You make it sound like every
> mail will recap history back to the last tag. That doesn't sound useful.
> 
Only when a tag is added, the mails will have a summary back to the last tag. Commit 
mails for normal commits just reflect the changes in that commit.

> We can just make a light tag (no message) on the last release commits; to
> prevent name collisions we can prefix them with "gnucash-docs" or
> "gnucash", so yesterday's tag will be "gnucash-2.5.2". I can't think of a
> useful tag for htdocs. It's not a repo that really has milestones. Maybe
> just tag the commit after svn_last with gnucash-htdocs-<branch name>?
> 
Yes, agreed.

Geert