fedora-commits

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 09:46:13 +0200 (CEST), Christian Jodar wrote:

> A commit message is an automatic one describing which changes have been
> commited. I don't think about something that could be replied to such a
> message.

*wow* I think you're mistaken. If you looked into the list archives, you
would notice that there have been many cases of replies to commits-list in
which somebody pointed out mistakes spotted in the diffs. The replies
could be redirected to a different list, but so far fedora-extras-commits
list is our only way of applying post-commit reviewing.

> But it is useful to have an idea of what is commited (at least
> to know about new packages).

At least packagers ought to skim over their own commit diffs anyway,
either prior to committing changes or after the automatically generated
diffs appear on the list.

> The other kind of messages there are on this list is the approval ones.
> And as it has been discussed before on this list, there is also no need
> for a reply.
> 
> Maybe a separate list could be created for theses messages. That's the
> only thing that could be changed from my point of view. But I am not sure
> it would be useful.

In particular with the increasing need for coordination in Fedora Extras
comes the necessity to actually have means of communication which
guarantee that packagers manage to contact eachother. This gets important
in cases of emergency situations, e.g. where somebody wants to protect a
build from breaking the repository. I find that replies to a mailing-list
are a time-saver, as they [sort of] guarantee delivery to a group of list
subscribers and the list archives, whereas posting only to a single e-mail
address found in a spec %changelog may apply unknown inbox/spam filtering.