CVS commit messages

[David Miller]

There's been several violations of this lately, so I figure this is a good
time to remind everyone what a good CVS commit log message looks like.

Please do NOT just copy/paste the summary of the bug you're fixing into the
cvs comment, unless that summary happens to be clear and concise.  People
use the cvs checkin messages to determine what changes have been made to
Bugzilla (there's a cvs-commit mailing list which those get mailed to,
aside from viewing the list on Bonsai), and we also use it to generate the
change log that's put in the status updates that we do from time to time.
Many of our bug summaries describe a problem.  Many times the bugs fix more
than just that problem.  Most of the bug summaries don't describe what to
do to fix the problem.

A checkin comment should contain a *short* description of what the patch
does.  NOT the summary of the bug, unless that bug summary happens to
describe that adequately.

Bad example: (sorry for singling this one out, it's not the only offender
lately, but it's an example of this)

--------
Fix for bug 90468: Bugzilla does not log out automatically when closing
the session. Patch by toms at myrealbox.com (Toms Baugis), with minor
cleanups by me. r=kiko, a=myk.
--------

Why it's bad: this seems to imply that the checkin will cause Bugzilla to
only keep logins around for a session.  Period.  This scares me, and will
scare lots of other people because they like having permanent (or long
duration) logins.  Looking at the patch, this is, in fact, not what it does.

This would have been better written as:

--------
Bug 90468: Add a parameter 'rememberlogin', which allows the admin to
choose whether the login cookie will be permanent, expire when the session
is closed, or to let the user choose on the login screen.
Patch by toms at myrealbox.com (Toms Baugis), with minor cleanups by me.
r=kiko, a=myk
--------

-- 
Dave Miller      Project Leader, Bugzilla Bug Tracking System
http://www.justdave.net/             http://www.bugzilla.org/