[coreboot] Superfluous commit messages from gerrit

mrnuke mr.nuke.me at gmail.com
Mon Dec 29 05:32:56 CET 2014


So I was looking at our git log. I can fit two, maybe three commits if I'm 
lucky. It's terrible. We have all this redundant information. We have both 
"Reviewed-on" and "Change-Id" lines. Those only point to the same resource. 
The "Tested-by" is useless. It's always Jenkins who tests changes. Then you 
have a "Reviewed-by" for every person who ever bikeshed on said patch. Since 
Paul has to say something on every single patch, he always has his own line in 
almost every commit.

"Reviewed-by" is not the same as "Acked-by". I've seen acked-by used to let 
linux folks know that some maintainer/big guy with more credentials than the 
author already likes the patch. Though Acked-by is not necessary, even for 
linux. Come to think of it, the only piece of information needed to find a 
commit on our gerrit is the hash. All the other lines, except for the "Signed-
off-by" are redundant. "Reviewed-on" and "Change-Id" will take you to the same 
place as the commit hash. All the crap added by gerrit is redundant.

Now add a patch that comes from our Chromium friends, and you've doubled the 
size of said pork. Is it convenient to have all that information in the commit 
message? Maybe. Is it necessary? Definitely not. Those lines are useful for 
tracking a patch, but once it's +2'd and submitted, gerrit should strip out 
all that pork. We might not even use gerrit anymore a few years down the road. 
Adding all this crap is pointless.

It's time to drop the crap.

Alex



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