Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 04/12] roms/edk2: advance to tag edk2-stable201903

[Laszlo Ersek]

(first of all, sorry about the delayed response, I've been away for a
few days, and then I got busy with something urgent -- thanks everyone
for the feedback)

On 03/14/19 19:29, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 3/14/19 1:02 PM, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
>> On 3/13/19 10:00 PM, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
>>> Update the roms/edk2 submodule hash from edk2-stable201811 to
>>> edk2-stable201903. The release notes are available at
>>> <https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/releases/tag/edk2-stable201903>.
>>>
>>> $ git shortlog edk2-stable201811..edk2-stable201903
>>
>> BTW this command output is very appreciated in when updating submodule,
>> I think we should enforce this as a default policy.
>>
> 
> I like that it lists all commit titles (which is usually helpful when
> titles are unique, but not infallible), and find authorship nice but not
> as essential; meanwhile, I feel that the shortlog output does a
> disservice in that the results are not chronological. If we are going to
> enforce anything, would the following output be any more useful, because
> it lists things in chronological order, and replaces authorship with
> commit ids for less ambiguity on reused subject lines?
> 
> $ git log --oneline edk2-stable201811..edk2-stable201903
> 
> or even some form of git log --pretty=format:XXXX that includes all your
> goals of things to see in a list of commits?
> 

This is a good suggestion / question, and I hesitated myself between the
two formats. My personal preference would indeed be "git log --reverse
--oneline" for this purpose. Here's why I decided for the shortlog
format instead:

- that's what the Linux kernel release (and release candidate)
announcements use too

- I checked some recent iPXE binary updates in the QEMU git history
(from Gerd IIRC), and those appeared to use the shortlog format as well.

Unfortunately, the authorship aspect of the shortlog format is in fact a
mess, in particular for edk2: I was forced to put the "mailmap" feature
of shortlog to use, lest I end up with multiple distinct blocks for some
people. There were two reasons for those: (a) genuine email address
and/or name changes during the edk2 development cycle, (b) people that
apparently can't give two shits about spelling their names/addresses
*consistently* over a handful of patches/series.

... Please pardon my French, but it was *really* annoying to struggle
with "uniq" and friends around midnight, before my PTO, to ultimately
distill a mailmap file of 9 lines. (I will not share that mailmap file
for now, in order to protect the guilty.)

So, I would absolutely prefer if we agreed on "git log --reverse
--oneline", rather than the shortlog.

Thanks!
Laszlo