AMD guys: commit messages?

[Emil Velikov]

Hi Ernst,

On 8 December 2015 at 13:43, Ernst Sjöstrand <ernstp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello list!
>
> I lurk here and try to follow Mesa/DRI and most specifically Radeon
> driver development, report bugs, test new stuff and help get the bugs
> closed and so on...
>
> However I see that the commit messages for AMD/Radeon are often very
> unhelpful. They don't state the motivation behind the commits. Is this
> a optimization, a nice-to-have cleanup or does this actually fix
> something? What does this fix?
> Are there tests or bugreports related?
>
> Improving this could make it easier for new developers to start
> contributing in the long run also!
>
> Examples:
>
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=d5a5dbd71f0e8756494809025ba2119efdf26373
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=338d7bf0531a10d90db75ad333f7e0a31693641f
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=4ebcf5194d98b47bd9e8a72b7418054708b14750
>
> This is also in the mesa dev guidelines, www.mesa3d.org/devinfo.html :
> "Patch fix is not clearly described. For example, a commit message of
> only a single line, no description of the bug, no mention of bugzilla,
> etc."
>
I'm glad that I'm not the only person noticing these. I've asked a few
times for people to write commit messages, mostly to get a summary of
what the patch does, as opposed to why it does it. I'm seriously
considering about not dropping fixes for [mesa] stable if they're so
terse.

I hope this situation improves, because as you've noticed a-is it make
things actually harder for anyone now working on the relevant code on
daily basis. And I doubt AMD wants to alienate "outsiders" from
working on their driver(s).

Thanks
Emil

P.S. Fwiw mesa-dev might have been better suited for this.