The "What's cooking" report lists the topics in flight, with a short
paragraph descibing what they are about.
Once written, the description is automatically picked up from the
"What's cooking" report and used in the commit log message of the
merge commit when the topic is merged into integration branches.
These commit log messges of the merge commits are then propagated to
the release notes.
It has been the maintainer's task to prepare these entries in the
"What's cooking" report. Even though the original author of a topic
may be in the best position to write the initial description of a
topic, we so far lacked a formal channel for the author to suggest
what description to use. The usual procedure has been for the
author to see the topic described in "What's cooking" report, and
then either complain about inaccurate explanation and/or offer a
rewrite.
Let's try an experiment to optionally let the author propose the one
paragraph description when the topic is submitted. Pick the cover
letter as the logical place to do so, and describe an experimental
workflow in the SubmittingPatches document.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Git documentation does this with the exception of ancient release notes.
Signed-off-by: Josh Soref <jsoref@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
GitHub wraps artifacts generated by workflows in a .zip file.
Internally, workflows can package anything they like in them.
A recently generated failure artifact had the form:
windows-artifacts.zip
Length Date Time Name
--------- ---------- ----- ----
76001695 12-19-2023 01:35 artifacts.tar.gz
11005650 12-19-2023 01:35 tracked.tar.gz
--------- -------
87007345 2 files
Signed-off-by: Josh Soref <jsoref@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
GitHub has two general forms for its states, sometimes they're a simple
colored object (e.g. green check or red x), and sometimes there's also a
colored container (e.g. green box or red circle) which contains that
object (e.g. check or x).
That's a lot of words to try to describe things, but in general, the key
for a failure is that it's recognized as an `x` and that it's associated
with the color red -- the color of course is problematic for people who
are red-green color-blind, but that's why they are paired with distinct
shapes.
Signed-off-by: Josh Soref <jsoref@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Current statistics show a strong preference to only capitalize the first
letter in a hyphenated tag, but that some guidance would be helpful:
git log |
perl -ne 'next unless /^\s+(?:Signed-[oO]ff|Acked)-[bB]y:/;
s/^\s+//;s/:.*/:/;print'|
sort|uniq -c|sort -n
2 Signed-off-By:
4 Signed-Off-by:
22 Acked-By:
47 Signed-Off-By:
2202 Acked-by:
95315 Signed-off-by:
Signed-off-by: Josh Soref <jsoref@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
There seems to be consensus amongst the core Git community on a working
set of common trailers, and there are non-trivial costs to people
inventing new trailers (research to discover what they mean/how they
differ from existing trailers) such that inventing new ones is generally
unwarranted and not something to be recommended to new contributors.
Suggested-by: Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Josh Soref <jsoref@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Many typos, ungrammatical sentences and wrong phrasing have been
fixed.
* sn/typo-grammo-phraso-fixes:
t/README: fix multi-prerequisite example
doc/gitk: s/sticked/stuck/
git-jump: admit to passing merge mode args to ls-files
doc/diff-options: improve wording of the log.diffMerges mention
doc: fix some typos, grammar and wording issues
Documentation/SubmittingPatches informs the contributor that gitk's
context menu command "Copy commit summary" can be used to obtain the
conventional format of referencing existing commits. This command in
gitk was renamed to "Copy commit reference" in commit [1], following
implementation of Git's "reference" pretty format in [2].
Update mention of this gitk command in Documentation/SubmittingPatches
to its new name.
[1] b8b60957ce (gitk: rename "commit summary" to "commit reference",
2019-12-12)
[2] commit 1f0fc1d (pretty: implement 'reference' format, 2019-11-20)
Signed-off-by: Andrei Rybak <rybak.a.v@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
While we could technically fix each and every bug on top of the
commit that introduced it, it is not necessarily practical. For
trivial and low-value bugfixes, it often is simpler and sufficient
to just fix it in the current maintenance track, leaving the bug
unfixed in the older maintenance tracks.
Demote the "use older maintenance track to fix old bugs" as a side
note, and explain that the choice is used only in exceptional cases.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The 'next' branch is primarily meant to be a testing ground to make
sure that topics that are reasonably well done work well together.
Building a new work on it would mean everything that was already in
'next' must have graduated to 'master' before the new work can also
be merged to 'master', and that is why we do not encourage basing
new work on 'next'.
Helped-by: Linus Arver <linusa@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
When working on an high-value bugfix that must be given to ancient
maintenance tracks, a starting point that is older than `maint` may
have to be chosen.
Helped-by: Linus Arver <linusa@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Background: The guidance to "base your work on the oldest branch that
your change is relevant to" was added in d0c26f0f56 (SubmittingPatches:
Add new section about what to base work on, 2010-04-19). That commit
also added the bullet points which describe the scenarios where one
would use one of the following named branches: "maint", "master",
"next", and "seen" ("pu" in the original as that was the name of this
branch before it was renamed, per 828197de8f (docs: adjust for the
recent rename of `pu` to `seen`, 2020-06-25)). The guidance was probably
taken from existing similar language introduced in the "Merge upwards"
section of gitworkflows in f948dd8992 (Documentation: add manpage about
workflows, 2008-10-19).
Summary: This change simplifies the guidance by pointing users to just
"maint" or "master". But it also gives an explanation of why that is
preferred and what is meant by preferring "older" branches (which might
be confusing to some because "old" here is meant in relative terms
between these named branches, not in terms of the age of the branches
themselves). We also add an example to illustrate why it would be a bad
idea to use "next" as a starting point, which may not be so obvious to
new contributors.
Helped-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Arver <linusa@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The phrase
and unless it targets the `master` branch (which is the default),
mark your patches as such.
is tightly packed with several things happening in just two lines of
text. It also feels like it is not that important because of the terse
treatment. This is a problem because (1) it has the potential to confuse
new contributors, and (2) it may be glossed over for those skimming the
docs.
Emphasize and elaborate on this guidance by promoting it to its own
separate paragraph.
Signed-off-by: Linus Arver <linusa@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
It could be that a suitable branch does not exist, so instead just use
the phrase "starting point". Technically speaking the starting point
would be a commit (not a branch) anyway.
Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Arver <linusa@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The discussion around subsystems disrupts the flow of discussion in the
surrounding area, which only deals with starting points used for the
git.git project. So move this bullet point out to the end.
Signed-off-by: Linus Arver <linusa@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Without the word "the", the sentence is a little harder to read. The
word "the" makes it clearer that the comment refers to discrete patches,
and not portions of individual patches.
Signed-off-by: Daniel Watson <ozzloy@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Update the description of the summary section to clarify that the
"do not capitalize" rule applies only the word after the "<area>:"
prefix of the title and nowhere else. This hopefully will prevent
folks from writing their proposed log message in all lowercase.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Extend the "describe your changes well" section to cover whom we are
trying to help by doing so in the first place.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
We give a guidance for proposed log message to write problem
statement first, followed by the reasoning behind, and recipe for,
the solution. Clarify that we describe the situation _before_ the
proposed patch is applied in the present tense (not in the past
tense e.g. "we used to do X, but thanks to this commit we now do Y")
for consistency.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Extend the guidance to choose the base commit to build your work
on, and hint/nudge contributors to read others' changes.
* jc/doc-submitting-patches-choice-of-base:
SubmittingPatchs: clarify choice of base and testing
We encourage identifying what, among many topics on `next`, exact
topics a new work depends on, instead of building directly on
`next`. Let's clarify this in the documentation.
Developers should know what they are building on top of, and be
aware of which part of the system is currently being worked on.
Encouraging them to make trial merges to `next` and `seen`
themselves will incentivize them to read others' changes and
understand them, eventually helping the developers to coordinate
among themselves and reviewing each others' changes.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
A superfluous ']' was added to the title of the GitHub CI section in
f003a91f5c (SubmittingPatches: replace discussion of Travis with GitHub
Actions, 2021-07-22). Remove it.
While at it, format the URL for a GitHub user's workflow runs of Git
between backticks, since if not Asciidoc formats only the first part,
"https://github.com/<Your", as a link, which is not very useful.
Signed-off-by: Philippe Blain <levraiphilippeblain@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Replace the discussion of Travis CI added in
0e5d028a7a (Documentation: add setup instructions for Travis CI,
2016-05-02) with something that covers the GitHub Actions added in
889cacb689 (ci: configure GitHub Actions for CI/PR, 2020-04-11).
The setup is trivial compared to using Travis, and it even works on
Windows (that "hopefully soon" comment was probably out-of-date on
Travis as well).
Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Move the section discussing the addition of a SOB trailer above the
section that discusses generating the patch itself. This makes sense
as we don't want someone to go through the process of "git
format-patch", only to realize late that they should have used "git
commit -s" or equivalent.
This is a move-only change, no lines here are being altered, only
moved around.
Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Update the documentation not to assume users are of certain gender
and adds to guidelines to do so.
* ds/gender-neutral-doc:
*: fix typos
comments: avoid using the gender of our users
doc: avoid using the gender of other people
Using gendered pronouns for an anonymous person applies a gender where
none is known and further excludes readers who do not use gendered
pronouns. Avoid such examples in the documentation by using "they" or
passive voice to avoid the need for a pronoun.
Inspired-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Derrick Stolee <dstolee@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The same "do not capitalize the first word" rule is applied to both
our patch titles and error messages, but the existing description
was fuzzy in two aspects.
* For error messages, it was not said that this was only about the
first word that begins the sentence.
* For both, it was not clear when a capital letter there was not an
error. We avoid capitalizing the first word when the only reason
you would capitalize it is because it happens to be the first
word in the sentence. If a proper noun, which is usually spelled
in capital letters, happens to come at the beginning of the
sentence, it should be kept in capital letters.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The text says "if you can certify DCO then you add a Signed-off-by
trailer". But it does not say anything about people who cannot or
do not want to certify. A natural reading may be that if you do not
certify, you must not add the trailer, but it shouldn't hurt to be
overly explicit.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Ted reported an old typo in the git-commit.txt and merge-options.txt.
Namely, the phrase "Signed-off-by line" was used without either a
definite nor indefinite article.
Upon examination, it seems that the documentation (including items in
Documentation/, but also option help strings) have been quite
inconsistent on usage when referring to `Signed-off-by`.
First, very few places used a definite or indefinite article with the
phrase "Signed-off-by line", but that was the initial typo that led
to this investigation. So, normalize using either an indefinite or
definite article consistently.
The original phrasing, in Commit 3f971fc425 (Documentation updates,
2005-08-14), is "Add Signed-off-by line". Commit 6f855371a5 (Add
--signoff, --check, and long option-names. 2005-12-09) switched to
using "Add `Signed-off-by:` line", but didn't normalize the former
commit to match. Later commits seem to have cut and pasted from one
or the other, which is likely how the usage became so inconsistent.
Junio stated on the git mailing list in
<xmqqy2k1dfoh.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com> a preference to leave off
the colon. Thus, prefer `Signed-off-by` (with backticks) for the
documentation files and Signed-off-by (without backticks) for option
help strings.
Additionally, Junio argued that "trailer" is now the standard term to
refer to `Signed-off-by`, saying that "becomes plenty clear that we
are not talking about any random line in the log message". As such,
prefer "trailer" over "line" anywhere the former word fits.
However, leave alone those few places in documentation that use
Signed-off-by to refer to the process (rather than the specific
trailer), or in places where mail headers are generally discussed in
comparison with Signed-off-by.
Reported-by: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn@sfconservancy.org>
Acked-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The description on sign-off and DCO was written back in the days
where there was only a choice between "use sign-off and it means the
contributor agrees to the Linux-kernel style DCO" and "not using
sign-off at all will make your patch unusable". These days, we are
trying to clarify that the exact meaning of a sign-off varies
project to project.
Let's be more explicit when presenting what _our_ rules are. It is
of secondary importance that it originally came from the kernel
project, so move the description as a historical note at the end,
while cautioning that what a sign-off means to us may be different from
what it means to other projects contributors may have been used to.
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Reviewed-by: Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>
Reviewed-by: Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn@sfconservancy.org>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
The documentation and some tests have been adjusted for the recent
renaming of "pu" branch to "seen".
* js/pu-to-seen:
tests: reference `seen` wherever `pu` was referenced
docs: adjust the technical overview for the rename `pu` -> `seen`
docs: adjust for the recent rename of `pu` to `seen`
As of "What's cooking in git.git (Jun 2020, #04; Mon, 22)", there is no
longer any `pu` branch, but a `seen` branch.
While we technically do not even need to update the manual pages, it
makes sense to update them because they clearly talk about branches in
git.git.
Please note that in two instances, this patch not only updates the
branch name, but also the description "(proposed updates)".
Where appropriate, quotes have been added for readability.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
While the MyFirstContribution guide exists and has received some use and
positive reviews, it is still not as discoverable as it could be. Add a
reference to it from the GitHub pull request template, where many
brand-new contributors may look. Also add a reference to it in
SubmittingPatches, which is the central source of guidance for patch
contribution.
Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Philippe Blain <levraiphilippeblain@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
"git log" family learned "--pretty=reference" that gives the name
of a commit in the format that is often used to refer to it in log
messages.
* dl/pretty-reference:
SubmittingPatches: use `--pretty=reference`
pretty: implement 'reference' format
pretty: add struct cmt_fmt_map::default_date_mode_type
pretty: provide short date format
t4205: cover `git log --reflog -z` blindspot
pretty.c: inline initalize format_context
revision: make get_revision_mark() return const pointer
completion: complete `tformat:` pretty format
SubmittingPatches: remove dq from commit reference
pretty-formats.txt: use generic terms for hash
SubmittingPatches: use generic terms for hash
Since Git was taught the `--pretty=reference` option, it is no longer
necessary to manually specify the format string to get the commit
reference. Teach users to use the new option while keeping the old
invocation around in case they have an older version of Git.
Signed-off-by: Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Quoting SZEDER Gábor[1],
SubmittingPatches is simply wrong: our de-facto standard format for
referencing other commits does not enclose the subject in a pair of
double-quotes:
$ git log v2.24.0 |grep -E '[0-9a-f]{7} \("' |wc -l
785
$ git log v2.24.0 |grep -E '[0-9a-f]{7} \([^"]' |wc -l
2276
Those double-quotes don't add any value to the references, but they
result in weird looking references for 1083 of our commits whose
subject lines happen to end with double-quotes, e.g.:
f23a465132 ("hashmap_get{,_from_hash} return "struct hashmap_entry *"", 2019-10-06)
and without those unnecessary pair of double-quotes we would have
~3000 more commits whose summary would fit on a single line.
Remove references to the enclosing double-quotes from SubmittingPatches
since our de-facto standard for referencing commits does not actually
use them.
[1]: cf. <20191114011048.GS4348@szeder.dev>
Signed-off-by: Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Since Git is planning on upgrading from SHA-1 to be more hash-agnostic,
replace specific references to SHA-1 with more generic terminology.
Signed-off-by: Denton Liu <liu.denton@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Applying CodingGuidelines about monospace on pathnames and URLs.
See Documentation/CodingGuidelines.txt for more information.
Signed-off-by: Corentin BOMPARD <corentin.bompard@etu.univ-lyon1.fr>
Signed-off-by: Nathan BERBEZIER <nathan.berbezier@etu.univ-lyon1.fr>
Signed-off-by: Pablo CHABANNE <pablo.chabanne@etu.univ-lyon1.fr>
Signed-off-by: Matthieu MOY <matthieu.moy@univ-lyon1.fr>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
We already advise people to make sure their documentation
formats correctly. Let's point them at the doc-diff script,
which can help with that.
Let's also put a brief note in the script about its purpose,
since that otherwise can only be found in the original
commit message. Along with the existing -h/usage text,
that's hopefully enough for developers to make use of it.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Signed-off-by: Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta@iki.fi>
Reviewed-by: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Junio C Hamano
Josh Soref
Andrei Rybak
Elijah Newren
Štěpán Němec
Linus Arver
Daniel Watson
Philippe Blain
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
Felipe Contreras
Bradley M. Kuhn
Johannes Schindelin
Emily Shaffer
Denton Liu
Corentin BOMPARD
Jeff King
Ville Skyttä