[Bioc-devel] All Package Maintainers Please README!

[Oleg Sklyar]

Just a suggestion until this finalised. Would not it be more natural to
tag a message with a commonly used comment sign, like # used in R or %
or @? It would also be more unlikely that someone puts such a tag at the
beginning of a public message.

Oleg
-  
Dr Oleg Sklyar * EMBL-EBI, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK * +441223494466


On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 10:48 -0400, James W. MacDonald wrote:
> Robert recently suggested that I make a stab at a blog-based changelog 
> rather than the current monthly postings, sort of similar to what Duncan 
> Murdoch has done with the R NEWS and windows CHANGELOG.
> 
> The biggest difference between what is done for R and what I will be 
> doing for BioC is this; R-core does a really good job of writing 
> explanatory notes describing what the change was, and what it means for 
> the end user.
> 
> On the other hand, the commit messages that people use range from the 
> ridiculous to the sublime. Since I will no longer be parsing the commit 
> messages by hand, I will not be able to remove the more useless messages 
> that people tend to use, and these things will go straight to the 
> changelog for all to see.
> 
> So, first thing; if you don't want your section of the changelog to be 
> populated with things like 'WTF was I thinking?!@!?@!?' or 'Oops', or 
> the venerable 'commit' or better yet, the ever popular ' ', you will 
> want to actually use a commit message that means something with respect 
> to the commit you just made.
> 
> Now I know some of the commit messages are not intended for public 
> consumption, so there is a way out. If you prepend your commit message 
> with INTERNAL, then it will be scrubbed. Or at least I think it will 
> ;-D. I'm using Python for the first time to do the parsing, so I am sure 
> there are bugs aplenty. Note that this INTERNAL thing is _by line_, so 
> if you do something like:
> 
> INTERNAL This is a commit message nobody should ever see.
> 
> But they can see this one.
> 
> Then the second part of the message _should_ get through. Note that you 
> need to use INTERNAL exactly, as it is always possible that someone 
> might use Internal at the beginning of a commit message that they want 
> published, so I am not doing any case-changing on the test for this string.
> 
> The changelog as it currently exists (with just one day of changes so 
> far) can be viewed here:
> 
> http://fgc.lsi.umich.edu/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi
> 
> Please take a look and send me any suggestions.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Jim
> 
> 
>