Patch and Commit message guidelines -- first draft

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello.

On Fri, 2011-03-04 at 11:44, Mark Hatle wrote:
> In the last meeting I offered to pull together some guidelines for 'good' patch
> and commit messages.  Below is my attempt at doing this.  The guidelines are
> from many of Wind River's internal guidelines, as well as simply general
> knowledge picked up over time.
> 
> I'm sure I've missed a few things below, but I hope this is fairly close to what
> is intended.

Thanks for getting this togteher.

> Common Errors in Patch and Commit messages
> ------------------------------------------
> 
>  - Don't simply translate your C code change into English for a commit

Lets go with "code change" instead of "C code change" as we don't really deal
much with C code in OE :)

> - Don't put absolute paths to source files that are specific to your site,
> i.e. if you get a compile error on "fs/exec.c" then tidy up the parts
> of the compile output to just show that portion. We don't need to see
> that it was /home/wally/src/git/linux/devel/2009/Nov/linux-2.6/fs/exec.c
> or similar - that full path has no value to others.

Better use an example of the OE-core tree here to avoid confusion.

> - Don't include timestamps or other unnecessary information, unless they are
> relevant to the situation (i.e. indicating an unacceptable delay in
> a driver initialization etc.)

- Don't use links to temporary resources like pastebin and friends. The commit
  message may be read long after this resources timed out.

Besides this small things I'm pretty happy with this document.

regards
Stefan Schmidt