usage of comments

[epeleg]

This is both a question to the codeice team and the community.

I was wandering what comments [would you recommend] / [are using] for the following scenarios:

First two are easy:

1) Branch creating (I personally put a description of the bug or feature that is supposed to be resolved or developed in this branc).

2) Pending changes check in (I try to describe main changes made in changeset).

The one I am less certain about is:

3) A merge - what do you put in the comment for this one? Merged branch description? "Merge" ? Summary of all changeset comments in branch ? Just leave empty ?

Thanks,

Eyal

[carpediemevive]

I'm very interested in what other people reply to this topic with. My answers below:

1) I typically do the same as you, but it has to be very short description. I always make a point to include the bug number/ticket number/etc. with it as well.

2) On topic branches (i.e. not a main development branch) I tend to be a lot looser with my commit comments. A very general idea of what changed in the changeset is all I put in. I almost never check-in directly to the main development branch, instead I do more merging of topic branches into it.

3) I state what branch it came from, what ticket/bug number it was aimed at implementing/resolving. I also label these if it's going into a release at all.

[manu]

Interesting topic! This is what we do in Codice.

1) We always use the task number with the "scm" prefix so all our tasks are like this "scm1234", in the branch comments area we usually write the task description.

2) We try to checking frequently, creating a small changeset that accomplish a small goal. Better for code reviews and it keeps the develop branch clean.

3) We use this pattern, first the branch name and then the task "release note" description, as we use the task per branch methodology in a radical way the only merges are from the task branches to the release branch, and this is done by our build master.

[CodingGorilla]

I was just about to post on this topic myself. Glad to see others are discussing it already.

I'm particularly curious on #3, as we use TeamCity to do builds. When I do a merge from a task/bug fix branch, simply including the name of the branch that I merged from doesn't provide much information to TeamCity (which our project managers use to track what's going on). It's especially difficult because [right now] plastic doesn't have an easy way to view check-in comments (they're all squished into a single line in the changesets view, right?).

So how do other's deal with this, ideally I'd like to be able to accumulate the changes and bring them into /main (or whatever) on a merge.

[manu]

you can review the changesets comments in the changesets view, as you said. You can also use the branch explorer, clicking in a changeset the options column will show you the comments.

And finally you can use the command line, for example, the following command will give you the comments of all the changesets in the branch: "cm find changesets where branch='/main/SCM10982' --format={comment}"