Subject: Re: [bug#42689] another try

From: Alexandru-Sergiu Marton <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2020 08:28:39 +0300

Hello Adam and Brett,

Brett Gilio <[email-masked]> writes:

> Adam Kandur <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>>>>>From 5cade1fff3fb64892321505edd9ac1b13420782e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
>> From: Adam Kandur <[email-masked]>
>> Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2020 17:40:50 +0300
>> Subject: [PATCH] add sbcl-livesupport in gnu/packages/lisp-xyz.scm
>>
>> ---
>>  gnu/packages/lisp-xyz.scm | 29 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>  1 file changed, 29 insertions(+)
>>
>
> Hi Adam,
>
> I am sorry to be a pest, but the commit message is still not following
> our snippet protocol. I was trying to apply your patch, and take care of
> it for you so that you could see what our expectation is more clearly
> but your patch is mangled.

Adam, I'm a fellow contributor, like you, and I'd like to share some of
what I learned when sending patches to Guix.

Brett says that your patch is mangled -- that usually happens at
sending, depending on your email client. If you create your patches with
`git format-patch`, I wouldn't trust an email client to keep the text
intact by just pasting in the body of the mail. I would, instead, attach
the patch file.

You could, instead of manually putting the patch in a mail yourself,
send it with `git send-email`. There is a great guide regarding how to
do this: https://git-send-email.io/ . This is what I use to send patches
to GNU Guix.

As for the commit message itself, besides the snippet solution Brett
suggested (maybe you're not using Emacs), there's always grepping the
git log. I run `git log` in the guix source directory and search (using
the '/' key) for whatever my patch does: if I'm adding a package, I
search for "Add", for example.

Here's what a commit that adds a new package usually looks like:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
commit 28cbf3ef42353a491028d405a66595d45f3c8998
    gnu: Add python-pgpy.

    * gnu/packages/python-crypto.scm (python-pgpy): New variable.
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Most of the time when adding a new package you follow this
template. Replace the package name and file with whatever you have and
you should be all set. (The "commit 28..." is just to show you what
commit is this taken from. You must care only about what follows after it.)

To format the commit message nicely, I recommend that you don't use the
-m/--message flag, but let git open your $EDITOR so you can easily write
multiple lines, like in the example above.

If you want to change the message of your last commit, you can use git
commit --amend.

If you want to read more about the ChangeLog format, I believe this is
the right place to look:
https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Change-Logs.html . Myself,
I never read that, but I always looks through the git log to see how
others formatted messages for similar commits before.

Cheers,
Sergiu